validation-gatelisted

# Validation Gate The one place in the lifecycle where the system stops and waits. Everything before it is cheap to change. Everything after it is not. The gate exists because a paragraph rewritten costs a minute and a schema rewritten costs a fortnight. ## 1. The rule No production code before approval. Permitted before the gate: reading the repository, running existing tests, prototyping in a scratch directory that is never committed, writing the specification and the proposal. Not permitted: schema files, migrations, endpoints, components, dependency installation, project scaffolding, configuration, commits of implementation. A scaffold committed before approval is implementation. It anchors every subsequent decision and makes the approval theatre. ## 2. The approval package Short. Someone must read it and decide, not study it. ``` Project one paragraph, what will exist when this is done Architecture the shape, in five to ten lines Stack one line per major decision, with the reason in half a line Database the entities and the one thing that is expensive to change Backend the shape and the authorization rule Frontend the shape and the accessibility target Infrastructure where it runs, and how it gets there Testing what will be tested and at which layer Deployment the mechanism, and the rollback Scope in, and explicitly out Assumptions every one still in force, with what changes if wrong Questions any