guideline-writing

# Guideline Writing Craft for authoring the instruction layer itself — the `.claude/` guide SoTs, `CLAUDE.md`, and plan files. Content pages have the four content-craft skills (jrn·con·enc·cit); this skill is their counterpart for the meta layer. Dotted IDs: `gdl.*` ([criteria.json](criteria.json)); the deterministic detectors live in [checks.py](checks.py) and run inside `python tools/lint.py meta`. ## Operative Rule vs Recital Every sentence in a guideline is one of two kinds, and only the first belongs in the body: - **Operative rule** — tells the reader what to do, when, and how to tell they did it right. Test: delete the sentence; if an executor could now act differently and still believe they complied, the sentence was operative. - **Recital** — explains how the rule came to be: options weighed, benchmarks absorbed, incidents survived, dates adopted. Recitals are history; history's SoT is `log.md` (append-only). A recital in the body is **deliberation narrative** — the central antipattern this skill exists to prevent. A failure mode earns **at most one line in the body** — the concrete trigger the rule guards against, stated as a present-tense condition ("a partial edit bumps only the date and masks body staleness"), never as a war story ("after the 05-20 incident we decided…"). The story goes to `log.md`. ## Force Tiers — MUST / SHOULD / MAY State every rule at exactly one force tier, and make the tier visible in the wording: | Tier | Wording | Reader's obligat...