coding
coding: plan, then the right loop
The bar for every line of code written here is current best practice: what is recommended and adopted today, not just an answer that runs. "It runs" and "this is how you should do it today" are different claims, and only meeting the first is how code ships resting on yesterday's idiom.
Every writing path starts with a plan, sized to stakes. A trivial change plans in one sentence, in your head. A design-level change plans in .issues/. When shaping is installed, it is the planner for those: hand the unsettled requirement there, come back with the spec, and skip straight to red. Without it, plan inline. The plan itself may or may not land on disk, the stakes decide. Planning includes verification: version-sensitive practice (API, CLI, config, idioms) gets checked against an authoritative source before use, never written from memory. Official docs and the repo's own conventions outrank blog posts and recall.
Dispatch
| Request | Path |
|---|---|
| New behaviour, or a bug whose cause is known | Failure list → red → green → refactor |
| Pure refactor | Prove the baseline green → refactor → green again. No manufactured red |
| "How should I write this now" | Verify against current sources → answer |
| Anomaly with unknown cause | Not this skill. dig finds the cause first |
Verification, the judgment not the reflex
The bar applies to every line of code. What varies is where memory can be trusted to meet it: actively verify on version-sensitive ground (a library's API surface, CLI flags, config schemas, anything deprecated-or-not, any question that contains "best practice"), because that is where confident recall goes stale first. Skip verifying stable knowledge (algorithms, settled syntax), facts sitting in the project (read them), and what the user already specified (use it).