Scope Guard

Keep one coding task from silently becoming a larger task. Scope Guard is a lightweight steering contract, not a lifecycle, implementation owner, reviewer, or persistent mode. Apply it directly while another owner works, or return the compact guard when the user wants to carry it into another agent/host.

Pin before building

Understand the affected flow, current owners, contracts, and real callers before minimizing anything. Then pin:

• outcome — the exact requested behavior/result;
• local non-goals / task exclusions — strong negative implementation boundaries for what this task will not solve or change; keep them with this task/plan/spec and do not promote them into repository-level .nongoals unless amose separately establishes a durable project-wide exclusion;
• expected change envelope — likely owners, subsystems, files/surfaces, and explicitly unchanged contracts; this is an evidence-backed expectation, not a prohibition on necessary discovery; and
• proof — the smallest evidence that can establish completion.

A small diff in the wrong place is not simplification. Revisit the causal owner when the change envelope starts growing rather than preserving the first plan by adding workaround layers.

Minimum sufficient mechanism

After understanding the real flow, prefer in order: