Engineer System Change

Treat every proposed change as a hypothesis about a real system, not as an implementation checklist. Establish whether the change should exist before designing or building it, then keep the solution and the process proportional to the risk.

Preserve the Task Boundary

• If asked only to assess, review, or plan, make no project or external-state changes.
• If explicitly asked to implement, including after an assessment, pass the decision gates before editing and verify the result afterward.
• Treat implementation permission as separate from permission to commit, push, deploy, publish, or update issues and pull requests.
• If repository truth matters, inspect the current target revision and relevant discussion. Do not rely on a stale checkout, an RFC alone, or remembered architecture.
• Separate verified facts, inferences, and unknowns. Do not turn missing evidence into a confident conclusion.

Apply the Decision Gates

1. Ground the Problem