[dmccoystephenson]

Summary

Replaces the hardcoded "wait for CI" anchor in the generated dev-loop template with two new placeholders so every generated skill can name whatever external signal grounds its self-review:

• {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_LABEL}} — short label (e.g. "CI", "manual validation", "snapshot regression suite")
• {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_CMD}} — the command or checklist that produces the signal

Motivation: PR #15's rubric anchor ("wait for CI green") didn't fit create-dev-loop itself, which has no CI. The example-h-dev-loop retrofit (example-h-dev-loop#8) had to hand-substitute "manual validation against a fixture repo" because CLAUDE.md designates that as this project's testing-changes process. That ad-hoc workaround is now structural.

Per RESEARCH.md §1, what matters is that the rubric has any external anchor — not that the anchor is specifically CI.

Closes #21

Test plan

• Both new placeholders added to Step 4 substitution table (lines 410–411), with format guidance for CI vs. manual-validation cases
• Phase 4 step 1 uses both placeholders; the surrounding intro sentence also generalized
• Phase 4 rubric "CI" universal item renamed to {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_LABEL}} (line 235)
• Phase 4 step 6 "a CI failure" → "a {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_LABEL}} failure"
• Phase 6 external-vs-internal note generalized
• Edge case "CI fails on the PR" generalized
• Step 2 exploration table gains a new "What is the external anchor for self-review?" question pointing at .github/workflows/ / CLAUDE.md / test command, in that order
• grep -oP '\{\{[A-Z_]+\}\}' reports {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_CMD}} and {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_LABEL}} and both have rows in the substitution table — placeholder-consistency invariant holds
• Verified: remaining "CI" mentions (Step 2 build/test/lint rows; substitution-table descriptions) are correct uses of CI as a source of repo info, not as the universal anchor name
• Per the rule shipped in PR Promote 'verify each Closes #N' to template Phase 4 #26, ran gh issue view 21 and confirmed the title/body match this PR

Retrofit

Per CLAUDE.md's promotion-with-retrofit checklist, four downstream skills need retrofits — three with label "CI", one with label "manual validation":

• example-l-dev-loop, example-q-dev-loop, example-a-dev-loop → label = CI, cmd = the existing gh pr checks <number> --watch block
• example-h-dev-loop → label = manual validation, cmd = the existing fixture-validation checklist (simplifies what was hand-rolled in example-h-dev-loop#8)

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drafted by Claude on behalf of Daniel Stephenson

[dmccoystephenson]

Self-review rubric:

• Scope: PASS — single file create-dev-loop.md; 13 insertions / 10 deletions all directly map to one of the six AC items in #21.
• Tests-new: PASS — both new placeholders are accompanied by table-row descriptions explaining how to derive them, with concrete worked examples for CI and manual-validation cases. The grep -oP '\{\{[A-Z_]+\}\}' check above confirms both placeholders appear in template body AND substitution table.
• Tests-fix: N/A — not a bug fix.
• Sibling structure: PASS — new substitution-table rows match the format of neighboring rows (single-line markdown table cells, \| `X` \| description \| shape); new Step 2 exploration row matches the format of its neighbors.
• Sibling renames: PASS — every instance of literal CI that referenced the universal anchor (intro line, step 1, step 6, rubric item, Phase 6 note, Edge case) was renamed in the same commit. Remaining CI mentions reference CI as a source of repo info (Step 2 build/test/lint rows), which is correct and not part of this rename.
• Docs: PASS — Phase 7 sources of truth for this repo are create-dev-loop.md (touched, internally consistent) and README.md (not touched; its 'Generated skill structure' section doesn't enumerate external-signal anchors and doesn't need to).
• Issue resolution: PASS — all six AC items from #21 met; verified each against the diff and against the issue spec.
• Validation: PASS — grep -oP '\{\{[A-Z_]+\}\}' + grep -oP '\| ' [A-Z_/]+'' cross-check confirms every {{placeholder}} in template has a substitution table row; no unresolved placeholders introduced.
• Placeholder-consistency: PASS — both {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_LABEL}} and {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_CMD}} appear in template body AND have rows in Step 4 table; no orphan rows added.
• Escaping: PASS — no new fenced code blocks introduced inside the outer template; the OLD fenced block in step 1 was removed and replaced with the {{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_CMD}} placeholder, which will be substituted at generation time (and the substituted value will itself contain proper escaping per the table description).

Adversarial probe — '{{EXTERNAL_SIGNAL_CMD}} is at column 1 with no leading whitespace; could a template editor accidentally indent it?' Considered: yes, but the substitution table description explicitly states 'the entire substituted block must keep the 3-space indent on every line', which means the substitution value carries indent and the placeholder line itself must NOT be indented. Cannot make this cleaner without breaking multi-line substitution. Documented in the table; leaving as-is.