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emrg: the iOS task template lacks the content-numbers and asking discipline #2646

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Description

@argszero

The iOS app task template (emrg/server/ios_app_prompt.md) states the product method a round runs by: two gates before a direction is chosen, the closed loop marked segment by segment, a static mockup the host confirms before any code, gates written before the features they gate, and the platform locks that decide the order of a submission. Four rules a round needs on those same subjects are absent, and each is a general method rather than a value belonging to one installation.

What is missing, and where its subject lives

  1. What the content costs. An app whose value is its content carries a second cost beside its code — acquiring the content, cleaning it, getting it into the build, and the size it adds. The template says nothing about measuring that cost, so a direction can be accepted with it assumed to be zero and the assumption discovered only after the work is done.

  2. Coverage and occurrences are two numbers. How many distinct items the app carries, and how often each of them appears, answer different questions. Nothing in the template separates them, so one is written where the other belongs and the app's claim ends up larger than what it does.

  3. A changed measurement basis voids the numbers taken on the old one. The template records numbers — installs and revenue in phase 6, the memory entries in section 7 — without saying what happens to them when the basis they were measured on moves. Two sets on different bases then coexist in one record, and a reader cannot tell which one a sentence means.

  4. A decision is asked as one question. Section 8 requires the closing summary to name what is blocked and on whom, and says nothing about the shape of the ask itself. A question that bundles two decisions cannot be answered, and an answered question returns when nothing records that it was already answered.

What the fix must satisfy

  • The first three are stated once, in the section that owns their subject — the content a round ships, inside phase 4 — rather than appended at the end of the file; the fourth goes in section 8, where the round's obligations to the host are stated.
  • Each rule is written in the template's own voice: no dates, no history, and no reference to any installation that met the gap.
  • tests/test_prompt_templates.py's IOS_METHOD_RULES pins each new rule to the heading that owns it, so a later rewrite that deletes one or moves it elsewhere reddens; the pins already standing for the rest of the template keep holding.
  • No instance-specific value is added. Team ids, account names, paths and credentials stay in a task's extra_prompt, which is where this template already says they belong.

Activity

  1. argszero commented on Oct 29, 2026

    @argszero
    OwnerAuthor

    Handled by #2647

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