Quality Gate

This is the smell gate. It exists because "it works" is not enough: workarounds, casts, assertions, giant branches, and shallow glue make code harder to change and easier to break. If a change trips this gate, fix the design or stop and escalate. Do not ship the smell and promise cleanup later.

The rule

No bandaids. No type-system escapes. No massive branching. No smell accepted as "good enough."

There are only two valid outcomes:

1. Remove the smell properly with a root-cause change, better data flow, a deeper module, a maintained library, or a framework/tool-supported path.
2. Stop and surface the real fix if removing it requires a larger design decision, migration, or upstream change.

Do not hide a defect behind a workaround, unsafe cast, non-null assertion, feature flag, fallback default, swallowed error, broad condition, or "temporary" branch.

Decision Order

Before adding code: