Readiness Scouts

/flow-next:prime answers a single question: is this repository ready for agents to work in it effectively, and ready for production? It does that by dispatching nine specialized scouts in parallel: eight each own one pillar of readiness, and docs-gap-scout checks documentation currency. Every scout is read-only - Edit, Write, and Task are disallowed - so priming a repo never changes it; it only reports.

Prime reports on every pillar but only fixes agent-readiness gaps (with your approval); production-readiness findings are surfaced for you to act on.

How they fan out

flowchart TB
  Prime["/flow-next:prime"] --> Scouts
  subgraph Scouts["Nine scouts (parallel)"]
    Build["build-scout"]
    Test["testing-scout"]
    Tool["tooling-scout"]
    Md["claude-md-scout"]
    Env["env-scout"]
    Sec["security-scout"]
    Obs["observability-scout"]
    Flow["workflow-scout"]
    Docs["docs-gap-scout"]
  end
  Scouts --> Report["Readiness report"]

Agent-readiness pillars

These directly determine whether an agent can work in the repo without guessing.

Scout	Tier	Pillar
build-scout	Fast scout	Build system, scripts, and CI - can an agent compile and run the project to verify its changes?
testing-scout	Fast scout	Test framework, coverage configuration, and the commands to run tests for fast local verification.
tooling-scout	Fast scout	Linting, formatting, type-checking, and pre-commit - the fast-feedback loop that catches errors before CI.
claude-md-scout	Thinking scout	Quality and completeness of CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md - conventions, commands, and what not to do.
env-scout	Fast scout	Environment setup: .env templates, Docker, devcontainers, and undocumented system dependencies.

Production-readiness pillars

Not strictly required for agents to work, but important context that prime reports.

Scout	Tier	Pillar
security-scout	Fast scout	Branch protection and rulesets, CODEOWNERS, and dependency-update configuration (checked via the gh API).
observability-scout	Fast scout	Structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, and health endpoints.
workflow-scout	Fast scout	CI/CD pipelines, PR and issue templates, and workflow automation.

Shared with planning

Scout	Tier	Job
docs-gap-scout	Thinking scout	Flags documentation that has drifted from the code. Also dispatched by /flow-next:plan.

Note

The seven mechanical, evidence-gathering scanners are fast scout dispatches: a fast scout line in your routing block moves them to a cheaper model, and without one they run on the agent’s default (Reasoning tier). claude-md-scout and docs-gap-scout are thinking scout dispatches, because documentation-quality judgment degrades on a fast model. Tiers map to a concrete model per platform - see the model-tier note on the overview. The judgment of what to fix lives in the prime skill itself.