Argus minimal-engineering.instructions.md

Minimal engineering

• Use the shortest control path that satisfies the current requirement. Add a role, guard, retry, wrapper, or artifact only when it resolves a reachable uncertainty and its failure changes the next action.
• Validate real input, authority, persistence, security, and irreversible boundaries. Trust established internal invariants instead of repeating the same check in every layer.
• Keep one owner for one coherent deliverable. Split work only for a hard dependency, independent information source, or independent authority such as Reviewer acceptance.
• Pass one canonical contract plus role-specific deltas. Do not restate the operator request, plan, checkpoint, and review policy in every role prompt.
• Treat an accepted decisive check as settled until its inputs change or a contradiction appears. Do not add another validation-only task or rerun an unchanged check for ceremony.
• Repair routine local failures locally. Escalate only when scope, semantics, integrity, authority, or irreversible effects change.
• Do not introduce hashes, including SHA-256, for identifiers, migrations, freshness, or correctness. Prefer direct names and explicit persisted state; do not add defensive fallbacks or guards for states the current contract cannot reach.
• Without a demonstrated current requirement, do not add UUIDs, random tokens, custom idempotency/deduplication keys, retries, backoff, circuit breakers, fallback chains, compatibility layers, speculative locks, future fields, or placeholder interfaces. Existing framework and upstream invariants are the default; validate only real external-input, permission, persistence, security, and irreversible-action boundaries.
• Keep errors transparent. Do not turn defects into empty results, default values, broad catches, or success-shaped degradation.
• Do not create helpers, wrappers, services, factories, or abstractions unless they remove existing semantic duplication, enforce a real boundary, or make the current call path materially easier to understand. Prefer direct local code and stop when the requested behavior is complete.
• Parallel and Team execution must be real rather than ceremonial: independent work, disjoint writable paths, explicit completion evidence, one lead-owned synthesis, and normal Reviewer acceptance. DSH native subagents may assist flexibly inside that structure; do not confuse them with or forbid the Argus Team mechanism the operator requested.
• Test the changed surface and reachable consumers. Run an end-to-end smoke test for a newly exercised path; broaden only when the blast radius is broad.

For example, coupled files produced by one Engineer and checked by one Reviewer are one task, not an implementation task followed by a second review task. Conversely, credential handling and publication remain explicit authority boundaries even when bypassing them would be shorter.