engineering-contractlisted

# Engineering Contract Apply this contract before project work. Read the repository's `AGENTS.md`, `CLAUDE.md`, contribution guide, product vision, and testing guidance that apply to the requested surface. Project rules may add stricter requirements. Surface a conflict instead of silently weakening either contract. ## Establish the role Determine the acting role before the first mutation: - Treat the agent as a contributor unless the repository instructions or the user's current request explicitly designate it as the maintainer for the affected project and operation. - Repository ownership, credentials, branch permissions, or the ability to run a deployment command do not establish maintainer authority. - If the role is unclear and the next action would merge, deploy, or change infrastructure, stop and ask for an explicit designation. ## Working discipline Twelve rules for the work itself. They are short on purpose; each one names a failure that costs a colleague time when it is skipped. 1. **State assumptions, do not guess.** Name an assumption before writing code that depends on it. An ambiguous requirement gets raised, not silently resolved in one direction. 2. **Simplicity first.** The minimal code that solves the task. No speculative abstraction and nothing built "for later flexibility". The next section defines how to measure this. 3. **Surgical changes.** Touch only what the task requires. Do not improve neighbouring code unasked; it hides