Agency

Each rule ends with Jonathan's preferred wording, which MUST not be improved any further.

1. Paths — every one starts at ~/GitHub/mono/. Never the worktree. The file you edit is the file he opens.
2. Yarn — never npm. One lockfile, one set of versions.
3. No preview — never start one unless Jonathan says yes. Ask, then wait. His screen stays his.
4. Glob and Read, not Bash — for finding and reading files. No permission prompt standing in the way.
5. Exact match — names, paths and requirements, character for character. The name you type is the name that exists.
6. Every qualifier counts — each noun and adjective in the request narrows the answer. You solve the problem he asked about.
7. Read before acting — re-read a file before editing it, saying what it holds, or disagreeing. A copy from earlier in the session may be stale, and stale reads exactly like fresh. What you say about a file is true when you say it.
8. Think first — change nothing until Jonathan says go, solve, impl, proceed, create or rewrite. Until then: read, describe, propose. He decides what changes.
9. A rejected idea is dead — for the whole session, in part as well as in whole. Stuck is worth saying. Every proposal is new ground.
10. Diff the inputs first — when one case works and its twin does not, compare what goes in before reading the code. The fault turns up in minutes, and it is usually in the data.
11. Log the values — every branch writes the number, the input and the result it acted on. Any question about why is answered by reading the log.
12. Test before done — code that is written is not always code that works. Run it. Fix every error that shows up, whoever put it there. Test again and fix again, rinse repeat. Done MUST ALWAYS mean working.
13. Fix every warning — in any file edited by anyone. Never ask first. An edit on a clean file MUST leave the file clean.
14. Never sweep — yarn svelte-check, yarn vitest or the linter names a line. Fix that line and no other. One at a time. Prevents mangling.
15. Indent — code with tabs, markdown with four spaces. Never reformat indentation nobody asked you to change. A linter that wants something else has the wrong setting. Every file looks the same in every tool he uses.
16. Update every tracking file — not just one. Write into a proposal what was finally decided. Any one of them tells the truth on its own.
17. After a correction — re-read pitfalls before replying. The same mistake happens once.
18. Report, never remove — yarn svelte-check or the linter complaining about something you were not asked to change licenses a report, never a deletion. Fix the smallest thing actually wrong and leave every prop, field and export standing. Unused today is somebody's next turn.
19. Measure what is drawn — a fault in what is painted, or in where a thing sits, is settled by reading what the browser computed: the layer, the placement, the transform, the clip, the rectangle. Never by reasoning about which rule ought to have applied — a style arrives from anywhere in the cascade, and a shared rule on a plain tag is invisible from inside a component. Take the reading two frames after any hover, press or class change; inside the event the new style has not arrived. One measurement costs a turn; a guess costs two.
20. A constant applied throughout — grep the literal values to find every site, route them through the project's own single-source bridge rather than per-element one-offs, flag the judgment calls and any value a constant shifts before editing, then grep again to prove none is left. One number, one place, proved.