budget-diff
budget-diff — Set a line budget before coding, then live inside it
Overview
The budget is set the way a manager sets one for a worker: before the work starts, and not by the person who will spend it. The executor never grants themself more room — every extra line is bought from the user, in advance.
Core principle: simplicity is the spec. The right solution is the one that fits the budget and reads plainly stupid at a whiteboard.
The budget bounds how the task is built, never what the task is. Every deliverable the user named gets priced into the budget as they meant it — a requested test file means test code, a requested flag means the flag. Shrinking or redefining a deliverable to shrink the number is cheating the metric. A scope cut is an option you present, priced in lines, for the user to choose — never a decision you make.