Context and Problem Statement

The kit was named ai-migration-kit for the half most consumers never install. Its issue → pull request lifecycle (create-issue, implement-issue, merge-pr, auto-dev, triage-backlog) runs on any repository every day; the seven-phase .NET pipeline runs once, on a legacy application. Measured on 2026-09-14: 3 stars, 1 fork, 19 unique visitors in fourteen days — nothing to protect, and every new install cements a name that costs more to change later. The name is an identifier six times over (ADR 0012): the repository and its Pages URL, two marketplace files, six host manifests, the suite: line of twelve skill frontmatters, the state paths two scripts write under, and 100 tracked files once history is excluded.

The shape was wrong too. #607 measured, with claude plugin marketplace add <path>, install and details on scratch copies of this tree, that a lifecycle-only team loads 17 components, a Read hook and two dnx servers where 12 components and no .NET would do — and that a plugin cannot be narrowed from a manifest: a marketplace entry’s component lists are ignored when the source carries a plugin.json, a skills/ directory at a plugin root is always discovered in full, a symlinked skill directory is discovered but a symlinked command file is not, and installed plugins are dereferenced into a cache.

A naming study (46 candidates over GitHub, npm, PyPI, crates.io, the web and domains) found the whole gate/threshold word field already taken by AI-agent tools — gatekit, sprag, detent, limen, gatelane, greenlight, redgreen — so a descriptive name is not ownable. Tagout is the docs site’s own creative north star (DESIGN.md: a gate that refuses by name is a lock-out / tag-out tag hung on the machine — who locked it, why, what clears it), free on npm and crates.io, two stars at most on GitHub. The owner validated it on 2026-09-14 (#610).

Considered Options

• Rename only, keep one plugin — the cheapest change, but the name would say “lifecycle” while every session still loads the .NET pipeline, its hook and its servers.
• Rename, and ship two disjoint plugins from one tree — plugins/tagout/ and plugins/tagout-migrate/, each a manifest plus per-skill directory symlinks and generated copies of its commands, hooks map and .mcp.json; no file under skills/ moves; the root is no longer a Claude Code plugin. Chosen.
• Move the migration half out of skills/ into a plugin directory as real files — no symlinks, but every gate that globs skills/ learns a second root and every <kit>/skills/migrate-legacy path breaks; a second major for the same result.
• Two repositories — forks skills/_shared/, tests/_lib.sh, release-please, host-adapters.py and the docs site, against the one-home doctrine (#324).

Decision Outcome

The kit is Tagout — repository phmatray/tagout, marketplace tagout-marketplace, suite: tagout — and it ships as two disjoint Claude Code plugins from one tree at one version (ADR 0003): tagout (plugins/tagout/) is the lifecycle — ten skills, two commands, three hooks, no MCP server, no .NET prerequisite — and tagout-migrate (plugins/tagout-migrate/) is the .NET pipeline — migrate-legacy, review-followups, five commands, the roseline Read gate, roseline + adr — installed beside it. Each plugin directory holds a hand-written manifest, per-skill and per-directory symlinks into the one skills/, scripts/, hooks/ and their siblings, and copies of its commands, hooks map and .mcp.json that scripts/host-adapters.py build writes and check refuses to see edited; check also keeps the partition complete — every skill linked from exactly one plugin, every link pointing at its namesake, no .mcp.json under plugins/tagout/, every <kit>/<path> a plugin’s skills name resolving inside it. The other hosts’ root manifests (Codex, Copilot, Gemini, pi) keep shipping the whole kit under the new name. The change ships as one major (feat!, ADR 0012’s window), in three PRs: the identifiers (#611), the two plugin directories (#607), the rebrand (#612).

Consequences

Good: a consumer installs the loop they run every day under a name that says so, with nothing they do not run loaded into their sessions; the .NET pipeline becomes an add-on found by its topics rather than the identity of the whole repository; nothing under skills/, commands/, hooks/ or scripts/ moved, so every <kit>/… path and every gate that globs skills/ is unchanged. Bad: one reinstall per consumer (tagout@tagout-marketplace), and the old marketplace name stops resolving once the release lands; git symlinks are now tracked, and a Windows checkout without core.symlinks gets two broken plugin directories while the other hosts’ root manifests still work — copy-by-build is the remedy if a consumer asks (it stopped being optional on the first Windows install: ADR 0017 makes the plugin directories generated copies, #619); fleet state written under …/ai-migration-kit/auto-dev/ is orphaned by the state-path move, and a running fleet finishes on the old plugin version; the routing table hooks/routing-context.sh injects still names /migrate in a lifecycle-only session. History keeps the old name: CHANGELOG.md, docs/journal/, reviews/, docs/adr/, docs/case-studies/, the dated design records under docs/superpowers/ and the frozen samples/ fixture are never rewritten, and the release-please PR is held until all three slices have landed so 3.0.0 is the rename and the split together.