loadbearing: Instructions file for Claude Code

LoadBearing — architecture for agents

The self-hosting principle

A compiler that cannot compile itself is not trusted with anyone else's source. LoadBearing accepts the same test: this repository is the tool's own first consumer. The spec in arch/Zphil.LoadBearing.ArchSpec governs this code, and every read verb runs against this solution in CI: check, render, status, graph, explain. The xUnit adapter runs the same rules as individually named tests. The renderer writes sixteen committed artifacts here, the block below, the diagram in ARCHITECTURE.md, thirteen per-directory cards and the model file loadbearing.model.json, each recomposed by a test that fails on drift. One of those tests goes further and fails on a committed card that no rule placement produced, so a card orphaned by a spec change cannot sit here being read. CI re-renders the repository and requires a zero diff, unscoped, because a card written somewhere nobody predicted still has to be committed. Only baseline has no gate pointing at this repository: it is the human escape valve, and a gate that ran it would be moving the ratchet.

The feedback loop is live in this working copy rather than in a clone. A Stop hook, with a SubagentStop twin for workers, runs check when a turn ends and refuses the stop on a red rule, so the agent reads the report and keeps working instead of handing back code that breaks a law; a registered MCP server answers architecture queries in the same session. Claude Code sessions here read this file and the cards beside it too, through a local @AGENTS.md import and Claude Code's option to read both CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md. That wiring is machine-local, so what a clone gets is hooks/: both wrappers, the config snippet, the launcher that keeps a warm server from holding this repository's build outputs, and what to paste where. The contract those wrappers implement does not rest on anyone's local setup. Tests execute them as real child processes across the whole exit-code mapping, and CI installs the packed global tool, walks the README quickstart end to end, and scaffolds the spec project the derive_spec recipe publishes — PackageReference and all — out of that same pack, once on a repository that pins package versions per project and again on one that manages them centrally, holding it green on conforming code, red on a violation, and red again when the one line that keeps a single csproj valid on both is deleted. The repository is the evidence for the product's claim: rules that cannot drift, prose that cannot rot.