Open trip standard
Hard checks vs soft facts; PRs, research Issues, and experiment Issues.
The open trip standard is a forkable GitHub repository shape for an operational journey. Trip truth is Git. Hard rules are declarative config run by a domain-neutral engine. The template is useful without an Alcove account.
Hard checks vs soft facts
Hard checks are deterministic. Identical repo state → identical result. They may fail CI for impossible states: broken schema, impossible times, a configured hard limit, a missing required link.
Soft facts are review context. Walking distance, weather sensitivity, prestige, and “must-see” lists are not failures unless you configure a hard limit. A planning budget total is not a failure just because it looks large.
Hard checks must not encode taste.
Pull requests
main is the accepted trip. Agents propose on branches. The traveler merges. A closed PR is a rejected or deferred proposal — not something to hide by deleting history.
Every material decision should land in the same commit as the state it changes, as a PR that names what was chosen, what it was compared with, and why.
Research and experiment Issues
When a review thread needs evidence, open a typed Issue rather than stuffing the thread with unread research:
| Kind | Use when |
|---|---|
| Research | Retrieve existing evidence for an open concern (opening hours, transit rules, prior sources) |
| Experiment | Test a requirement-fit hypothesis against reality or a falsifiable plan |
Link the parent PR or unresolved review thread. Prefer primary sources. Label status honestly (proposed → in-progress → resolved).
What stays out of the public template
Traveler preferences, postmortems, and cross-trip lessons live in Alcove subject memory. The trip repo lists who is on the trip by opaque id only.