with-the-grainlisted

# With The Grain Every repo has a **grain**: the direction its maintainer already cuts. Grain lives in the diffs, not in the tree. Commands for every step are in [COMMANDS.md](COMMANDS.md). ## Read the grain **This is the skill.** Everything after it is transcription. Profile **one author**: the top committer of the last twelve months, or whoever merges. Averaging contributors produces a style nobody actually writes. Gather these, quoting verbatim. Paraphrase is where grain gets sanded off. - **Commits** - three subjects, one full body, and the median diff size as a number. That number decides how you split your own work. - **Architecture** - read the three largest recent feature commits end to end. Where does new functionality land? An enforcement script (line budgets, dependency rules) outranks anything you infer from the code. - **Tests** - of the last fifty commits touching source, what percentage also touch tests? Match it. Most predictive figure in the profile, and the one nobody measures. - **Comments** - three from inside recent diffs, so you see what this maintainer writes rather than what they inherited. - **PRs** - one body copied whole, plus the typical size. Where the repo has no template, the structure is personal habit, so matching it counts double. - **Triage** - how they write refusing someone else's work, usually a different register from how they write proposing their own. Done when every bullet has its three verbatim artifacts and both numbers exis