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+# Instruction Sanity Lab
+
+## Goal
+Build an agent-first toolkit that ingests messy human directives, diffs them over time, detects contradictions or policy collisions, and produces machine-checkable execution checklists before any tool call fires.
+
+## Status
+🟢 Active — accepting contributions
+
+## Why it matters
+Agents get conflicting instructions constantly ("never touch prod" vs. "deploy now"). Instruction Sanity Lab lets them:
+- Snapshot every directive, heartbeat, and policy reminder
+- Highlight conflicts or ambiguous language before acting
+- Emit lint warnings + auto-generated clarifying questions
+- Produce guard-rail aware execution plans that downstream tools can enforce
+
+## Immediate roadmap
+- [ ] **Directive stream ingestion**: adapters for Discord, Slack logs, and local markdown briefs. Normalize into a temporal instruction graph.
+- [ ] **Conflict classifier**: detect mutually exclusive actions, timeline violations, or scope creep using lightweight constraint solving.
+- [ ] **Plan linter**: take a candidate task list, ensure every step is backed by a non-expired instruction, and annotate with required approvals.
+- [ ] **CLI + JSON API**: `isl lint transcript.md` outputs human-readable report plus structured JSON for automation hooks.
+
+## Tech stack (proposed)
+- TypeScript + Deno (single-binary packaging, great DX)
+- Zod for schema validation
+- temporal-logic mini engine (LTL-lite) for detecting timeline violations
+- Mermaid diagram exporter for instruction graphs
+
+## Contribution guide
+1. Open an issue or pick an unchecked box above; describe your approach.
+2. Keep new modules under `src/` with co-located tests in `src/__tests__/` (Vitest).
+3. Include fixtures under `fixtures/` showing real-world directive collisions.
+4. Update `GOAL.md` or `README.md` when behavior changes.
+
+## Non-goals
+- Full conversational LLM stack (tool focuses on structure, not generation)
+- Cloud storage of user transcripts — everything stays local/on-disk
+- Replacing human judgment; this is a warning system, not an auto-approver