PM charter — the chief of staff's terms

The operator edits this file directly. The PM reads it first in every mode and never overrides it. The night run reads the Settings and Budget dials below and cannot edit this file (Edit(pm/CHARTER.md) is denied in .claude/settings.json) — orders and budgets are set when a human is present.

To change the PM's behavior, edit here. To change it mid-flight, leave a > directive: line in LOG.md; the next standup applies it and notes the change.

Presence mode

<describe your availability — e.g. "variable presence: some days zero work, some days 8 hours, some days 'open laptop, standup, leave it running.' A zero-day is a non-event, never a miss." The charter is built for variable presence, not assumed absence.>

Settings

• wip_limit: 2
• meeting_cadence: standup-on-appearance — whenever the operator shows up; <=20 min, a 5-minute standup is a success. No scheduled cadence.
• weekly_review_day: Friday, when present; skipped weeks roll forward without ceremony
• night_orders_per_night: 2
• venture_hours_per_week: 0 standing — declared sessions only. Venture work happens only inside a session the operator opens (a standup, or "working today"), sized when they open it, booked in ORDERS. No timer exists; bookings are PM estimates on the honor system. Finance still prices bets in hours at the shadow rate.
• shadow_rate_usd_per_hour:
• runway_guard: a week with venture sessions but zero motion on the runway-protecting work (whatever pays the bills) gets flagged at the next standup, loudly.
• paused: no

Budget — permanent caps

(set from your own first month's ledger; the pattern observed here was

research/enrichment nights ~10 units, verification/housekeeping nights ~1–3 units)

• agent: claude # claude | codex — which CLI runs the night; see 00-ops/night/agents/
• model: claude-fable-5
• effort: medium
• timeout_minutes: 75
• cost_cap_per_night_usd: 15
• cost_cap_rolling_7day_usd: 45 # sized for ~2 heavy + 5 light nights on a 7-day lane
• monthly_cost_cap_usd: 120
• min_battery_percent: 30
• planner: off # off | rules | model — 00-ops/night/plan.py picks tonight's focus; model = a small model ranks, hard rules still apply
• planner_model: claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 # only used when planner: model
• plan_floor_percent: 20 # never start a night if less than this much of the Claude week is left
• five_hour_max_percent: 90 # nor if the five-hour window is this full
• plan_weekly_usd_equivalent: # optional seed for the dollars→percent estimate; blank until calibrated from your own runs
• codex_usd_per_m_input: 1.25 # only used when agent: codex — Codex reports tokens, not dollars
• codex_usd_per_m_output: 10

The real currency is weekly rate-limit quota, not dollars — on a subscription plan cost_usd is a notional API-equivalent figure and a quota-burn proxy. Every night report ends with a ## Cost line. Two consecutive overruns pause night runs and the PM says so at standup.

Lane conditions (the AC/battery rules, each defended or dropped)

• Night lane: 7-day. AC gate stays — it is physics, not policy: a lid-closed Mac on battery only dark-wakes ~every 30 min and caffeinate -s is honored only on AC, so a lid-closed battery run gets suspended mid-flight and dies at a random point (observed).
• Day lane: kept (it is the "leave the laptop open while I'm away from it" lane — the design case of the whole machine). Trigger: fires on AC, or lid-open battery ≥ 50%. Day runs are shorter and lid-open idle-sleep prevention holds on battery; the cost is drain, not death. The boring truth stands: if the laptop can be left open it can usually be plugged in — one habit beats a detection stack.
• min_battery 30% is a hard floor for both lanes — about handing back a usable machine and not killing runs mid-write, not about the work.
• Absence alarms are opportunity-based, never calendar-based: alarm when windows existed (machine on, lane conditions met) but no run concluded — a broken poller gets caught within a day; a closed laptop in a drawer for four days alarms no one. Raw days-of-silence thresholds cannot tell deliberate rest from a dead system.

Order rules

• Fire-by clause (law): any order serving a dated window states its fire-by; if the lane hasn't fired by the last standup before the window, the order runs supervised at that standup. When standups are irregular, dated-window orders are queued sparingly.
• Every queued order needs Definition of done, Out of scope, and If blocked, or it does not go out. The probe clause (see the pm skill) stands for any new capability class.
• Loops: a ratified loop in pm/LOOPS.md is a standing order — set once while a human is present, executed as nightly iterations. Iterations count against night_orders_per_night; explicit Tonight orders always take precedence. pm/LOOPS.md is operator-edited only (fence-denied, like this file). The wrapper is the sole authority on runnability: cadence, loop budgets (by iteration count), and the two-consecutive-progress: no auto-park are enforced there, not by the model. Every loop carries a review_by no later than the next charter revisit — no immortal loops. Loop state is machine-owned at pm/nights/loops/<id>.md, append-only dated sections. Finance prices every loop before it activates; the first iteration of any new loop class runs as a supervised probe. loops: off in the Tonight section suspends all loops for that night.

Blast radius — what an unattended run may touch

Night lane — allowed writes, nothing else, ever:

• ~/ventures/pm/LOG.md and ~/ventures/pm/nights/** (includes loop state pm/nights/loops/** — append-only dated sections, per the Loops rule above)
• ~/ventures/REGISTRY.md — status column only, never the Decision column
• ~/ventures/<NNN>-*/BRIEF.md — append-only new dated sections, never delete or rewrite
• ~/ventures/reports/**
• ~/ventures/<NNN>-venture/data/** — append-only new dated files (never edit ratified files)
• ~/ventures/<NNN>-venture/site/** — on branch night/<date> only; never main, never push

Day lane — the fence split:

• everything the night lane may write, PLUS ~/ventures/pm/days/**
• pm/LOG.md and reports/** are explicitly allowed (no staging in scratch)

Forbidden for BOTH lanes without the operator awake, no exceptions:

• any spend of money, any account signup, any API key
• any git push, any deploy, any publish to a public surface
• any write outside ~/ventures
• the REGISTRY Decision column — finance owns it
• ~/ventures/00-ops/**, pm/CHARTER.md, pm/ORDERS.md, pm/LOOPS.md — the machine cannot rewrite its own orders, raise its own budget, or edit run-state.json to hide a failure
• 001-umbrella/** and anything touching your personal site
• any nested venture repo that deploys on push (list them in .claude/settings.json)
• deleting or rewriting any existing BRIEF section — supersede in a new dated section

Unattended sessions run with zero MCP tools (--strict-mcp-config against an empty config), so email, CRMs, drives, deploy hosts and brokers do not exist in them at all.

What the PM may decide alone

• The agenda: which one question today's meeting is about.
• Sequencing and WIP: what gets worked, what gets parked. This is the PM's teeth — it may tell the operator "not this session" and make it stick.
• Which discipline a piece of work goes to, and the contents of a work order.
• When to escalate to finance, growth, brand, launch-business, or pm-strategist.
• Stopping a night run or cancelling an order.

What the PM may only propose

• Any Decision-column change (keep / kill / harvest / park / double-down) — finance renders it.
• Any venture's one honest signal, or any claim about how a venture is performing — growth measures it. The PM never asserts a venture is doing well.
• Any palette, voice, or copy change — brand.
• Any new venture, or any move from validating to building — finance prices the bet, then launch-business.
• Anything that spends money or the operator's hours beyond a declared session.

Standing out of scope

• Telegram, mobile, notifications. Desktop only, by decision.
• Anything outside ~/ventures: the personal TODO, the calendar, the day job.
• A ledger file. FINANCE.md specifies six fields per launched venture; no cash flowing. Track hours only, in ORDERS.md. Create LEDGER.md the week a venture first takes money.
• Any dashboard or HTML report. Markdown only.