docs(agents): split the language rule — Chinese for maintainer chat, English on GitHub (#6692)

[os-project-manager]

Fixes #6692

Documentation only, two files. A dev agent was being told both languages at once: the two in-repo files it is instructed to treat as binding said Chinese for PR/issue prose, while every dispatch prompt said English. This lands the maintainer ruling of 2026-08-08 in the files themselves, so the next agent reads one rule instead of picking between two.

The ruling this implements

Quoted verbatim and untranslated, as recorded on #6692:

issue 和 PR 必须用英文，在 claude code 中和我讨论可以用中文。

English for GitHub artifacts (issue and PR titles, bodies, comments); Chinese is fine for talking to the maintainer in Claude Code. That resolves the card in favour of the split it identified: the language for maintainer conversation and the language for repo artifacts are separable things.

What changed

1. AGENTS.md §Communication — the old first bullet merged the two rules into one sentence, and its parenthetical explicitly assigned 「PR/issue 讨论中的解释性文字」 to Chinese. That clause is exactly what the ruling overturns. The section is now split:

• maintainer conversation in Claude Code (chat replies, round reports) → Chinese;
• GitHub artifacts — issue and PR titles, bodies, comments → English, with the ruling quoted verbatim and dated at the point of use, so the next reader finds the authority instead of inheriting it second-hand;
• quoted Chinese rulings stay verbatim and untranslated inside an English body — rewriting a quoted ruling is rewriting the ruling. The quote in that same bullet is an instance of its own rule.

2. .claude/agents/os-dev.md, "Definition of done" — the PR bullet said "explanatory prose in Chinese per repo convention". That sentence is now false, so it says English, names the artifacts it covers, points at AGENTS.md §Communication for the authority, and carries the verbatim-quote rule with it. The rest of the bullet (the session-URL attribution footer) is untouched.

Neighbouring sentence fixed in the same pass

The section's last bullet ends 「不要因本条而改写」 — "do not rewrite because of this rule", written when the section held one language rule. With the section now holding several it reads as pointing at only the previous bullet, so it becomes 「不要因本节而改写」. Its substance is unchanged: code, identifiers, commit messages and ADR/doc prose keep their existing conventions. The ruling names issue and PR; it does not reach commit messages, and this PR does not extend it there.

Why the citation is part of the deliverable

The contradiction survived because the English policy was propagated through dispatch prompts that no one could trace to a maintainer statement — the PM seat said so plainly on the card. The measured cost was two full PR-body rewrites in one afternoon and a corpus that went both ways on the same day under the same identity (#6556 Chinese, #6691 English). A dispatch prompt is written fresh per card; AGENTS.md and the os-dev template are read once by every agent, which is why the rule now lives there with its source attached.

Verification

Premise re-checked against origin/main before editing: both stale sentences were still present (AGENTS.md:11, .claude/agents/os-dev.md:180), despite the same-day touches from #6632 / #6648 / #6691. Anchors were located by content, not by line number, and re-verified after git merge origin/main — no conflict with #6586, which had not landed on that file.

Gate list enumerated from .github/workflows/lint.yml and run locally after git commit, all green:

check:nul-bytes            OK (6258 tracked text files, no raw ASCII control bytes)
check:doc-authoring        365 files clean
check:docs-audit-scope     178 hand-written docs in sync
check:role-word            OK (44 baselined files, no new occurrences)
check:quick-reference-counts  13 sections match their tables
check:adr-anchors          OK
check:skill-frame-sync     4 copies isomorphic across 3 files; 3 axes
check:skill-frame-freshness  frame current with origin/main
check:skill-compatibility  11 SKILL.md reconciled

check:skill-frame-sync matters here because it reads .claude/agents/os-dev.md; the edit is in "Definition of done", not in the decision frame, and the gate confirms the frame is untouched.

The quoted ruling was byte-checked after writing: full-width comma U+FF0C and full stop U+3002 preserved, claude code lower-case — verbatim, not normalized. Self-scan beyond the gate (grep -naP '[\x00-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x7f]') is clean on both files.

No changeset: this is the agent operating manual, it publishes nothing to npm and is invisible to users of the packages. skip-changeset applied as a union with the labels already on the PR.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
objectstack	Ignored		Aug 8, 2026 1:53pm