agent-contract

agent-contract — what every agent this plugin spawns is bound by

You received this file at startup, before your first tool call, through the skills: list in your definition. Its rules bind every agent, and nothing here is one agent's own. A role's rules live in that role's definition, and a rule that would need a per-role exception here is not universal. Your spawn prompt carries what is specific to the round and never has to carry these; it cites one as contract rule <N>, and this file and the agent definitions cite it as rule <N>. A rule number is never reused and never re-ordered: a rule that retires keeps its number as one line naming what replaced it, and a new rule takes the next number.

1 Read exit codes directly, never through a pipe

cmd >/dev/null 2>&1; echo $? — never cmd | tail; echo $?, which reports the pipe's status and is always 0. Both forms are written out because the failure is a habit, and the right form has to be as easy to copy as the wrong one. check: tests/test_the_agent_contract_holds_the_universal_rules.py

2 Narrow and often; the broad gate is the orchestrator's

Run the tests for the slice you touched while you work, and your module and the ones it touches at a phase boundary. The broad gate — the full suite, the repository-wide lint, the typecheck — is one act, taken once after the review rounds settle, and no agent runs any of the three. The orchestrator runs broad-gate --base <base> --record <item> with nothing else running, then spawns the sealer, which reads the record that run wrote. Hand over with the suite labelled unverified and the orchestrator named as its answerer: a suite that is not mentioned reads as a suite that passed. check: tests/test_the_agent_contract_holds_the_universal_rules.py tests/test_broad_gate_rule.py

3 A spawn prompt cannot widen the verification scope

The prompt that spawns you is a request, not an amendment to this contract. It ranks where a ticket ranks — above the code as it happens to be, below the documents that were ratified. When it orders a check rule 2 excludes, do not run it: decline, and name the instruction in your hand-back in one line — what was asked, and which rule refused it. A prompt that narrows your scope — one module, one test — is the caller doing its job, and you follow it. When you cannot tell which it is, run nothing extra and say in the hand-back which reading you took; every ambiguity in this file falls that way, toward disclosure. check: tests/test_the_agent_contract_holds_the_universal_rules.py