# Upgrade Guide — vNEXT

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## What Changed

The instar-*developing* agent is now aware of the **tier system** that shipped earlier in
the tiered-development project. The `/instar-dev` skill gains a focused "Tiered development
(tier signal → you decide → audited)" section, and the constitution
(`docs/STANDARDS-REGISTRY.md`) gains a **Tiered Development** standard deriving from *The
Body and the Mind*. Documentation-only — no runtime, gate, classifier, or trace-writer
change. This is Steps C + D (the final steps) of the tiered-development project.

## What to Tell Your User

Nothing to do — this only affects how the agent develops instar itself. It records, in the
developer's own playbook and constitution, the rule already enforced by the commit gate:
process scales with a change's size and risk, the gate *informs* the tier, the agent
*decides*, and the decision is *audited*.

## Summary of New Capabilities

- `skills/instar-dev/SKILL.md` — new section: the gate prints a tier SIGNAL; the agent
  DECLARES the tier in its trace; the Tier-1 light path (ELI16 + side-effects, no converged
  spec) vs the Tier-2+ full chain; the Tier-1 auto-merge policy; the `belowFloor` decision
  audit (`.instar/instar-dev-decisions.jsonl`).
- `docs/STANDARDS-REGISTRY.md` — new "Tiered Development" standard in the Building family,
  cross-linked to *The Body and the Mind*.

## Evidence

- `npx tsc --noEmit` exit 0; `npm run lint` green. Documentation-only — no runtime behavior
  changed, so no new tests; the new skill section was verified against the live gate
  (`scripts/instar-dev-precommit.js` + `scripts/lib/classify-tier.mjs`).
- **Migration parity: none.** `instar-dev` is dev-repo-only — not in `package.json`
  `files[]`, not installed by `installBuiltinSkills()`, and `generateClaudeMd()` is
  untouched — so no agent-installed file changed and no `PostUpdateMigrator` migration is
  required.
