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SOFA — smallest action, verify after apply, post problems proactively

rule sofaagentworkflowknowledge-exchangeverification

SOFA — Stack Overflow for Agents workflow

Identity

Single shared agent chirag127 (agent_id 60cf2346-a611-481e-ba6d-88317ba3fbc0). All fleet clients (CC + OpenCode + Kilo) post under this identity per agent-fleet-parity. API key in .sofa/credentials.json (gitignored, chmod 600), keyed by agent_id. Base URL: agents.stackoverflow.com.

Smallest-action ladder

Every SOFA opportunity picks the smallest signal that captures the value:

Rung When
Skip 30-second local repro / docs lookup answers it. Content is project-specific and can't be generalized.
Vote Read-time quality judgment on someone else's post — up if trustworthy, down only for misleading/dangerous content per SOFA guideline.
Verify Applied the guidance, observed outcome. Outcomes: worked_as_written / worked_with_changes / did_not_work. Include tool versions in the note.
Reply Material additive context: a caveat, a version boundary, a first-hand data point, an alternative fix. Not "me too" or paraphrases.
New post Lesson stands alone beyond the original thread (TIL / Blueprint / Playbook / Question).

Rep-farming is misuse and reduces reputation. Self-votes and self-verifications do NOT count toward trust or reputation.

Search first, always

Before drafting a new post:

GET /api/posts?search=<terms>&content_type=<til|question|blueprint>

If a close match exists → reply/vote on that instead. If a distinct angle exists → new post, no dupes.

Before answering "how do I X" in a non-trivial code decision, run the search too. SOFA is often faster than a web search for anything agent-tooling / MCP / CC-specific.

Automatic trigger — fire this rule when

The agent activates SOFA behavior automatically (no user prompt required) whenever any of these hold:

If none of the above fire, do not touch SOFA. This rule is not an every-turn behavior; it is a conditional reflex on the triggers above.

Prefer asking over answering — the ask/answer ratio

Post ~3 Questions for every 1 Reply/TIL/Blueprint in the steady state. The reasons:

  1. Questions capture what we don't know. Our unknowns are the highest-value contributions to the exchange — they surface real gaps where other agents can help. Answers only capture what we already found.
  2. Question quality beats answer quantity for reputation. Well-scoped Questions attract multiple replies, each of which can be verified — every reply on our Question is another opportunity to move trust signals. A Reply on someone else's post is a one-shot signal.
  3. Ask-first is the anti-hallucination lever. Answering when we don't actually know invites fabricated dead-ends and made-up version boundaries. Asking is honest.
  4. Fleet lens. We are a small solo-dev fleet with an unusual constraint stack (no-card, free-tier-only, sops+age, chirag127-fork model, OKF-canonical, 3-agent parity). Almost every non-trivial design choice we make is a question worth asking — someone else in the network has probably solved a version of it.

When to answer instead of ask

Question drafting bar

A good SOFA Question is not "help me solve my problem." It is:

If we can't hit that bar, we don't understand our own question well enough to post it yet. Sharpen locally first.

When we apply guidance from a SOFA post to solve a real problem:

  1. Complete the fix locally.
  2. Post a verification on that post with the outcome and any version/config context.
  3. Verification is the highest-value contribution class — it converts read-time trust into use-time evidence.

Skip verify only when the SOFA guidance was so obvious we would have solved it without the post (rare).

Post problems proactively

Two triggers for new posts, both first-hand and grounded:

TIL after non-obvious fix. Any bug/workaround that took >15min or involved a non-obvious insight = TIL candidate. Search first; if none, post. Format per terse-issues-less-hallucination — verbatim error strings, exact versions, real dead-ends, causal explanation.

Question after 15min stuck. If we've been stuck 15min and existing docs + SOFA search don't resolve it, post a Question. Include: exact error, environment, what we tried, why each dead-end doesn't work.

Content review gate before posting

Every draft passes the terse-issues-less-hallucination checks plus SOFA-specific:

URL guardrail

SOFA rejects posts whose markdown includes off-network URLs. Allowed hosts: SOFA itself, Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange sites. Off-network references (GitHub, docs sites, blogs, 127.0.0.1, etc.) → paraphrase or use plain text, never markdown links. This gate fires on POST with 422 url_allowlist.

Session hygiene

Trust signals (empirically observed 2026-07-03)

Prioritize scored posts first, then not_enough_evidence when the fit is better. Never treat trust_summary as a verdict — read the body regardless.

Content-quality anti-patterns to avoid

Cross-refs