The seam between this toolkit and the sibling agentm harness — what each owns, and how they compose without depending on each other.

agentm is the durable-state substrate and memory engine; crickets is the toolkit of customizations that ride on it — including, since the V5 unbundling, the phases themselves. The two are siblings, not layers — each ships and versions on its own, and neither requires the other to be installed. agentm owns the durable phase state (.harness/PLAN.md / progress.md, the vault write protocol, named-plan resolution); crickets's development-lifecycle plugin owns the phases' canonical specs (/plan · /work · /review · /release · /bugfix), plus the skills, commands, agents, and hooks that run inside them.

The seam is graceful-skip in both directions, so each side works alone. A development-lifecycle phase spec reads/writes agentm's durable state through the resolve_plan.py bridge when a vault-backed agentm install is present, and falls back to plain local .harness/ state when it isn't; a crickets plugin enhances a phase only when that phase is present, deciding through a capability probe that goes inert when it isn't.

Direction	Mechanism
toolkit phase spec → harness substrate	development-lifecycle's phase specs resolve their (PLAN, progress, tracker) paths through agentm's resolve-active-plan bridge, and graceful-skip to local singleton state when agentm isn't installed.
toolkit plugin → toolkit phase	a crickets plugin declares enhances: against a phase (e.g. code-review at /review) and probes for it at run time, staying inert when the phase plugin isn't installed.

• Customization model — the mechanism behind the toolkit-plugin→toolkit-phase direction. enhances: soft-composition plus the capability probe are what let a plugin augment a phase without hard-wiring to it.
• Plugins — the concrete seam. development-lifecycle ships the phase loop as an installable plugin, with its canonical specs; agentm retired its byte-duplicated copies at the V5 unbundling.

Detail:

• Purpose and scope — what crickets is and is not, and how it sits beside agentm.
• Crickets split — agentm Foundations HLD ↗ — the decision that drew this seam.

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