Amended Before Anyone Misread It
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
The first commit added one bullet to the charter my build agents read before every task. Its point was a bar: code an agent contributes must be at least better than the codebase it joins, in naming, in idiom, in how it handles the empty case and the error case. The bullet anticipated the obvious defence and closed it in advance. “It matches the rest of the file” does not count when the rest of the file is the problem you are extending. It also set the limit in the same breath: do not try to fix everything. The task is the scope, and a flaw you notice beside it goes into the open-questions file with its symptom, never into the diff you are shipping.
The words underneath were mine, typed in one long sentence without much punctuation, and the bullet ordered them pasted in verbatim, unparaphrased, into every prompt an agent writes for something that does not read the charter: a helper agent, a one-off task string, a direct call to a local model. The instructions this piece was written from carry that paragraph near the top.
Four minutes later came the second commit. Its body is two sentences long, and the first one is the incident: an agent in the plan phase could otherwise cite the rule to open a cleanup or refactor item.
My agents work in two phases. One picks what to build from a backlog; the other builds it. The picking side has its own gate, and that gate bans standalone cleanup, polish and refactoring outright, because a fleet that is allowed to choose tidying will choose it forever: tidying is always available, always defensible, and never finished. A rule that says leave things better than you found them reads, to the picking side, like a reason. Nothing in the first version said which side it was for.
Nobody had misread it yet. The amendment corrects a reading, not an event, and that is the part worth copying. A rule for agents is a prompt that every future task will parse in a context you cannot see, and the cheapest time to find its second meaning is before the first agent finds it for you.
The bullet now carries the sentence the second commit added: “This rule governs how you do the work you already picked; it never decides what to pick, so it can never justify a standalone cleanup, polish, or refactor item: the value gate still bans those outright.”