judge-minimum-difflisted

# Judge Minimum-Diff Lens Use when judging a code change, diff, or implementation report. This is the rubric dimension the Pythinker judge subagent applies to every non-trivial diff — the same ladder that lives in the base system prompt's §6 (Code Standards), surfaced here as an explicit rubric so the judge, an implementer doing pre-flight, or a reviewer running the over-engineering skill apply it uniformly. The judge applies the full ladder. There is no mode switch on the judge (`lite` / `full` / `ultra`); the implementer is the role that would carry a mode toggle if one is ever introduced. ## The ladder — walk it before writing code; stop at the first rung that holds 1. **Does this need to exist at all?** A speculative need is skipped, said so in one line. YAGNI is the highest rung. 2. **Does the standard library do it?** Use it. 3. **Does a native platform or framework feature cover it?** A database constraint over an app-level check, a built-in form control over a picker library, the language's own construct over a hand-rolled one — use it. 4. **Does a dependency already in the manifest solve it?** Use it; never add a new dependency for what a few lines cover. 5. **Can it be one line?** Make it one line. 6. **Only then** write the minimum code that works. When two rungs both hold, take the higher one and move on. The ladder is a reflex, not a research project. None of this overrides the guards below: trust-boundary validation, error handling that prevents