No Fakes Discipline

Active enforcement skill. Detects intent to substitute the real system; injects refusal stderr. Codifies Shannon's stricter posture than upstream "no-mocking-validation-gates": there are no tests in Shannon. No CI-fixture carve-outs. No "just for local development" exception.

The Violation This Prevents

When facing integration challenges (timeouts, API issues, CLI problems, slow backends, expensive sandbox accounts), there's a temptation to:

1. Create "mock" or "test" endpoints that return fake data
2. Add "fallback" modes that bypass the real system
3. Rationalize "it's just for testing" or "it's just temporary" when Shannon explicitly forbids substitution
4. Write "fixture" files that hard-code expected responses
5. Add if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'test') guards that branch around the real call

This is NEVER acceptable in Shannon. The runtime enforces NO mocking, stubs, or placeholder data EVER.

Pattern Detection — Rationalizations to Recognize

Watch for these — they all mean the discipline is about to fail: