Maintaining the Intellectual Space

Current Task and Outcomes

Operational task materials may be kept in a designated task workspace, such as _currenttask/ outside FISS/. This workspace can house task statements, research, plans, and intermediate artifacts, including operational artifacts described in the skills section. It serves as an active workspace for the task; its organization is defined by the team. Being located outside FISS/ does not exclude these materials from the broader intellectual space of the project.

If a project uses such a workspace, document its rules in an appropriate project document: for example, in FISS/knowledge/project/ or in FISS/overrides/ if overriding skill defaults.

Workflow documentation should specify applicable project rules:

• Which materials are temporary and what happens to them upon task completion;
• What results must be transferred into durable knowledge and when;
• Where task state is tracked;
• Which files are committed to version control and which are excluded.

It can also describe how logical artifacts used by skills map to project files or external systems.

Thus, FISS accommodates both long-term knowledge and immediate state. Workflow rules tie them directly to ongoing team work.

Updating Materials

To realize the “Maintain context” principle, it is recommended to incorporate a context audit into the standard task completion checklist:

• Did valuable new knowledge emerge that benefits subsequent tasks? Transfer it to the appropriate area or primary external source.
• Did rules, architectural decisions, constraints, or active state change? Update the affected documents.
• Were files added, moved, or renamed? Update indexes, read conditions, and incoming links.
• Are there outdated representations? Update them or clearly record their deprecated status.

In practice, this check is conveniently performed as part of task completion: review the work outcomes and determine what should be preserved, handed off to the owner of the respective material, or discarded if the outcome has no durable value. For example, a FISS maintenance skill can be created to classify outcomes in this way after each task and consider work complete only after integrating all results of durable value into the relevant sections of the intellectual space. For an individual developer, this may mean that after completing the current task, they should not take on the next task until the project context for the current task has been updated in FISS.

In parallel work, this does not require waiting for other tasks to complete: if a task depends on an outcome that is not yet integrated into FISS, that outcome should be explicitly included in its working context. Once the dependent work is complete, the outcome should be integrated into FISS in the regular manner.

This is the recommended maintenance workflow; specific roles and review moments are determined by the team.