Laws
One law per burn, with the move that replaces it. Blunt so they survive a busy shift.
File Integrity and The Truncated Command Ledger
Law: An unmeasured file write is an assumed corruption.
Instead
Verify file size and inspect tails immediately after every edit.
Connector Drift and The Compliant Node That Wrote Nothing
Law: Never accept an agent self-report of external write authority.
Instead
Confirm every write through an independent round-trip readback.
Filesystem Mounts and The Disappearing Colon
Law: A filesystem mount can corrupt byte streams without breaking transport.
Instead
Hash critical files against the host disk before execution.
Buffer Limits and Eaten at the Letter G
Law: Unchecked truncation presents identically to clean completion.
Instead
Enforce explicit pre- and post-generation item counts on every output collection.
Local Infrastructure and The Static Ghost Dashboard
Law: Serving markup is not serving an application.
Instead
Probe API endpoints with live requests during startup verification.
Tool Discovery and Rebuilding the Wheel in the Dark
Law: An unindexed utility does not exist to an agent.
Instead
Query an explicit tools index before writing new infrastructure.
Deployment Verification and A Two-Hundred for Stale Bytes
Law: A successful response code is not evidence of a fresh deployment.
Instead
Diff payload content or release hashes against the upstream source.
Hallucination and A Real Identifier for an Imaginary Paper
Law: A resolvable DOI does not validate the claim wrapped around it.
Instead
Pull and compare publication metadata against the returned claim before citing.
Bibliographic Verification and The Hundred-Percent Failure Run
Law: Unverified citation generation yields complete bibliographic drift.
Instead
Gate every literature pass through an external citation validator.
Test Suite Blindspots and Green Tests on an Omitted Voltage
Law: A green test suite only proves you tested what you remembered to question.
Instead
Benchmark physical equations against known analytical ground truth and outside review.
Multi-Agent Consensus and The Fabricated Consensus
Law: Multi-agent consensus claims can be synthesized out of whole cloth.
Instead
Verify inter-agent agreement directly from raw transcripts.
Cross-Platform I/O and The Carriage Return Integrity Trap
Law: Sandboxes that ignore host newline translations create false confidence.
Instead
Open files in binary mode whenever enforcing byte-level integrity.
Access and The Unanswered Door
Law: An unanswered prompt is not a refusal.
Instead
Queue the permission and wait. Do not spam the approval bridge.
Capacity and Shoveling the Wrong Drive
Law: Price the bottleneck before moving the data.
Instead
Profile the real constraint before a multi-gigabyte transfer.
Ephemeral disk and Stranded in the Sandbox
Law: A deliverable is not archived until its generator leaves ephemeral disk.
Instead
Move the builder into the kept tree before calling the artifact done.
Handoffs and The Ghost Patch
Law: A handoff that records an unverified fix is worse than one that records the bug.
Instead
Require a run that shows the fix before marking the item done.
Egress and The Egress Wall
Law: A sandbox egress block looks like a dead credential from the inside.
Instead
Separate a local network block from an upstream auth failure before declaring the service dead.
Buffers and Missing at Four Hundred Bytes
Law: A truncated status buffer turns a healthy service into an alert.
Instead
Read the whole payload before deciding an item is absent.
Batch runners and The Double Launcher
Law: Two copies of a generator will clobber the tree they are repairing.
Instead
One instance only. Lock the runner before the batch starts.
Runbook and Wrong Drive Letter Lingering in the Runbook
Law: A runbook drifts. The live disk decides.
Instead
Check the letter against the attached disk before the next setup.
Rails and A Phantom Credit
Law: A table that is wrong on every row will still look like a source.
Instead
Read the rows before trusting a credit the table invented.
Billing and A Short Answer With a Long Bill
Law: The bill can dwarf the text you can see.
Instead
Compare the meter to the visible answer, and use the free lane for a routine prompt.
Stale claims and The Project That Was Not Deleted
Law: A deletion claim goes stale the same way a pointer does.
Instead
Re-test the project. Do not inherit the sentence.
Assertions and Called Browser-Only
Law: A repeated label is not a test.
Instead
Hit the public model list before writing the limitation down.
Silent success and The Replace That Changed Nothing
Law: A success flag can describe a no-op.
Instead
Read the file back after a replace. The flag is not the edit.