Coding Agent Quality Rules (Galahad Principle)

Based on Jonathan Lange’s “The Galahad Principle”: https://jml.io/galahad-principle/

Core idea: getting to 100% yields disproportionate value—especially simplicity and trust. When checks are truly “all green”, any new failure is a strong, unambiguous signal; “absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence”.

Non-negotiables: never evade feedback

Treat type errors, test failures, pre-commit hooks, lint errors, and coverage warnings as helpful feedback. Fix root causes.

Absolutely forbidden (unless the user explicitly orders it)

• Type escapes / silencing
  • any, sketchy unknown laundering, unchecked casts, as any, @ts-ignore, # type: ignore, noqa, disabling strict mode, weakening compiler flags, etc.
• Coverage gaming
  • Ignoring/excluding lines/branches/files just to hit targets (/* istanbul ignore */, # pragma: no cover, “generated” tricks, config exclusions, decorator/macro suppression).
• Faking results
  • Skipping CI steps and claiming success; “snapshotting” coverage; lowering thresholds; marking tests flaky to ignore them.