Trellis Brainstorm

Non-Negotiable Planning Contract

A request to build, implement, fix, refactor, or "go ahead" is not approval to leave planning. Task-creation consent is also not implementation approval.

For every non-trivial task, the user must respond at least once after the initial request before implementation begins. If no clarification is needed, that response must approve the final planning summary described below.

While any user-owned product, scope, UX, compatibility, risk, or acceptance decision remains unresolved, end the turn with exactly one highest-value question. Do not edit product code, dispatch implementation, or run task.py start.

Non-Negotiable Evidence Rule

If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead.

This is mandatory. Before asking the user a question, first check whether the answer is already available in code, tests, configs, docs, existing specs, or task history.

Do not ask the user to confirm facts that the repository can answer. Ask only for product intent, preference, scope, risk tolerance, acceptance behavior, or decisions that remain ambiguous after inspection.

Repository evidence establishes current behavior and technical constraints. The user's intended behavior, feature scope boundaries, and UX preferences are never answerable by repository evidence alone, even when an existing pattern exists; existing patterns are options and recommendation evidence, not decisions.