optimization-mission-playbook

# Optimization Mission Playbook ## What This Playbook Is For Load this playbook when the mission's goal is to **move a metric**: make something faster, smaller, cheaper, higher-scoring, more accurate, higher-throughput, better-compressed, better-ranked, or closer to a solver/objective bound. The signal is a number with a direction and a workload that produces it. Do not use it for missions whose goal is durable behavior (a feature, a port, a migration, an API) — those are engineering missions; use `engineering-mission-playbook`. When a mission has both — build a benchmark harness *then* optimize a hot path, port a library *then* tune it — load both playbooks and record the boundary. Durable behavior and scaffolding may use engineering assertions; metric search should normally run as targetless optimization work, with formal assertions reserved for genuine durable commitments or externally required sign-off. This playbook has two halves. **The strategy** (Posture through Anti-patterns) is how to think about an optimization mission — read it first; it is the reasoning every decision below depends on. **The method** (Operating Order onward) is how to express that thinking as orchestrator investigation, targetless experiment work in the current checkout, ledger review, and patches in this runtime. The method references the runtime lifecycle and task schema but does not redefine them. ## Posture An optimization mission moves a metric. You are not building toward a known end ...