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Rules and governance

Which rules apply here, whether anything loads them, and whether they still agree with each other.

Rules and governance

A rule that is written and never loaded is not a rule. This area covers the distance between a stated convention and an applied one: provider files that disagree, directory rules nothing reads, policy that changed in one place and went stale in its projections, and enforcement that everybody believes is running.

8 moments

Every moment that names this one. Derived from the moments; this page keeps no list.

  1. opened CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md and found two different rulebooks for one repositoryEach provider reads its own hand-edited file, nothing relates them, and which contract applies depends on which tool is open. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  2. found the rule for that directory in a README no session ever loadedA local rule is either in the always-loaded file, where every session pays for it, or beside the code, where nothing relates it to the path being edited. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  3. watched the always-loaded instruction file grow past a thousand linesEverything important gets appended to the always-loaded file, so every session pays for every rule and reads none of them carefully. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  4. changed a policy in one place and found the old one still in force in three othersA decision is updated at its source and the generated copies keep serving the previous version, with nothing reporting the difference. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  5. found a rule everyone believed was enforced and nothing ever invokedEvery artefact of enforcement exists — the rule, the script, the test — and no path connects them, so the control is fiction. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  6. found code that contradicted a decision the repository had written downThe decision was recorded and the implementation went the other way, because nothing relates a decision to the paths it governs. cost: highoccasional Why, and what to do →
  7. reviewed a well-written contribution that broke a convention it had no way to discoverAssistants let anybody produce plausible contributions at volume; the conventions that make one correct are still only in the maintainers. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  8. was asked who made a change and under what policy, and had only a commitAttribution stops at the commit, so what authorised a change, what verified it and what governed it are unrecoverable. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →