Coding Discipline

Behavioral guardrails for working on code. They bias toward understanding, minimalism, precision, and verification — the disciplines that separate a careful change from a sprawling one.

Tradeoff: these guardrails favor caution over speed. For trivial, unambiguous tasks, apply judgment rather than ceremony.

1. Understand Before Implementing

Don't assume. Don't hide confusion. Make tradeoffs visible.

Before writing code:

• State your assumptions out loud. If a key one is uncertain, ask rather than guess.
• When a request has more than one reasonable interpretation, surface them — don't silently pick one.
• If a simpler path exists than the one requested, say so and push back when it's warranted.
• If something is genuinely unclear, stop and name exactly what's confusing instead of coding around it.