Try provisioning it

Not a recording. You type the command, you answer the real coldstart interview — the same questions, defaults and choices the engine ships — and at the end the actual generator runs on your answers and hands you the two files it produces, to read here or download — including what it writes when you ask for an autonomy dial above its ceiling.

Three of the four things on this page are the engine’s, not ours: the dry-run output is captured from scripts/coldstart.sh --dry-run, the questions are read from its questions.json, and the files at the end come from generate.py run server-side on what you typed. The notes in the margin are ours, and say so.

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The same thing, in words

For anyone reading without JavaScript, or who would rather not type: coldstart.sh --dry-run prints an ordered plan and exits before touching anything. It halts at step 7 — HALT — and that halt is deliberate: provisioning wires everything mechanical and then stops, because the next decision is what the team should actually work on, and a script guessing at your backlog would be worse than stopping.

Past the halt comes the coldstart interview: 19 core questions about your project’s identity, stack, deploy target and autonomy dials. Your answers go to scripts/coldstart-interview/generate.py, which writes two files — config.json (the dial defaults and the active role roster) and CLAUDE.project.md (a project overlay, not the canonical CLAUDE.md).

The dials have ceilings. Ask for external.system at level 5 and the generated file says 2, because that is the ceiling and no answer raises it. There is no override flag; the number in the file is simply the smaller one. That is the mechanism the safety page describes.

Then what?

The plan above stops at step 7 on purpose. Provisioning wires everything mechanical and then halts, because the next decision — what should the team actually work on — is not one a script should guess at. You fill in an epic, re-run with --resume, and it seeds that backlog as GitHub Discussions.

From there every change follows the same path, and you can watch a real one go through it: one pull request, end to end — the objections, the re-reviews, the gates and the merge.