tool-stewardship — consult first, write last, document always

A research program in which agents do much of the work accumulates capability only if someone makes it accumulate. Code gets written constantly; the question is whether the tenth problem starts where the ninth finished or starts from zero. Left to defaults it starts from zero: each session writes a script, solves its problem, and exits, and everything the script learned leaves with the context that held it. A shared toolkit converts that loss into compounding — but only under habits that do not happen on their own: consult before writing, improve in place rather than copy, document the day you build, retire what has been superseded. This file is those habits as procedure.

The economics are lopsided. Consulting an index costs minutes; rebuilding an instrument costs hours, and the rebuild is usually worse, because the existing tool embodies fixes for failures its author already hit and a fresh script embodies none. A tool that has survived many problems carries their corrections; new code carries only its author's foresight. The same asymmetry is why patching beats forking: a fork stops inheriting the moment it is copied, so every later correction to the original must be rediscovered in the fork, usually by getting a wrong answer first. And documentation is same-day work because the author is the only person who knows what the tool assumes, and only briefly. A page written a week later records the memory of an intention; a page written the day of the build records the fact of a behavior.

Procedure

Before writing any code

1. Search the index by capability, not by name. You are looking for "something that fits a rate to a time-stamped log," not for a title you half-remember. Read past the one-line summaries: a near-miss matters, because a near-miss plus a patch is the usual right answer.
2. Read the candidate's page in full. The page says when the tool applies and what test its output must pass. Skimming the page and then "verifying" by eyeballing one output is how the wrong tool gets trusted.
3. Run it on a trivial case with a known answer before running it on your problem. This costs a minute and catches both your misreading of the interface and any rot in the tool itself.
4. Climb the decision ladder in order: use as-is → patch or extend → wrap → write new. Writing new code obliges you to state, in one written sentence, which existing tools you checked and why each falls short. If you cannot write that sentence, you have not consulted; go back to step 1.

When patching an existing tool