fix: never go silent on a question - #675
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The ladder decides *how much to build*, never *whether to respond*. An over-compliant model read rung 1 ("Does this need to exist at all? Speculative need = skip it") and "shortest path to done" as license to not respond when there's nothing to build, going silent with 'nothing to build here'.
Add an explicit guard as the first rule in Rules (and in the fallback prompt in ponytail-instructions.js) so a question is always answered. Regenerated the OpenClaw skill mirror.
Co-authored-by: David <39264588+daveealex@users.noreply.github.com>
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Bug
The ladder decides how much to build, never whether to respond. An over-compliant model read rung 1 ("Does this need to exist at all? Speculative need = skip it") and "shortest path to done" as license to not respond when there's nothing to build — going silent with "nothing to build here" and refusing to answer the user's question.
Fix
Add an explicit guard as the first rule in Rules (and in the fallback prompt in ponytail-instructions.js) so a question is always answered. Regenerated the OpenClaw skill mirror.
Credit
108 tests pass.