Ways of working: the working agreement on one page
Three parts: the principles and practices, the guardrails each learned once, and the harness that backs them. A fourth panel states only what changes when the session runs remotely.
Principles and engineering practices
- Spec before implementation.
- Non-functional targets as numbers, measured, not asserted.
- Development scale and production scale kept apart in every claim.
- Verification against the live stack, with scripts that can run again without side effects.
- Each code review logged to a file, with its resolutions.
- A real finding that is not this phase's work goes to the backlog with enough context to become a spec, never left in the transcript.
- Programme and customer names never reach a commit message, tag, README, CI file or the code.
What efficiency never cutswhatever the budget says
- The spec
- The unit suite
- Live verification
- The logged reviews
- The hand-off records
Cut the cost of looking, not the looking itself.
Guardrails, each learned onceeach rule carries the incident that produced it
A search that comes back empty is evidence about the search, not about the code.From a scoping session that reported a defect after searching for the implementation it expected; the code had been built earlier under other names.
Any count that will be quoted is sampled in the same session before it is stated.A pattern match measured 45.7 %; sampling showed it was detecting something else, and the real figure was 0.4 %.
A correction is made in the document that carried the wrong number.From the same scoping session, not only in the conversation.
The harnessrules as instructions, backed by hooks
- The rules load as instructions every session.
- A rule that must not be skipped becomes a hook, because prose is followed or it is not.
- The hooks report; they never block: each thing a hook might block has a legitimate case, and a blocking hook would be a worse trap than the one it guards.
When the session runs remotelythe six phases run the same; only this differs
- Sync matters more. Several remote sessions can push between two desktop sessions.
- "The owner is away" is the default. A full-stack check is recorded as built, awaiting live verification, and goes on the desktop queue; never routed around.
- Evidence is captured, not watched. A headless render and a screenshot; any visual edited is read by a sub-agent that returns a short verdict.
- Two pushes before the session ends, trunk and session branch, then a check that local and remote are level. Work on a session branch alone was lost once, on 2026-08-21.