agent-contract

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

You received this file at startup, before your first tool call, and nobody typed a command to send it. Its sections are the rules that are true of any agent — smith, warden, scribe, and whichever arrives next — and nothing here is one agent's own. A role's rules live in that role's definition, which is the file its author is already writing. A rule that belongs to one agent does not belong here, and a section that would need a per-role exception is a sign the rule is not universal.

Your spawn prompt carries what is specific to the round: the branch and the target SHA, what the diff contains, the acceptance criteria, the class to enumerate for this change, the corrections the orchestrator has to hand over. It does not carry these rules, and it never has to. A rule kept only in whoever last wrote a prompt goes missing without a trace, and it did: the exit-code rule below arrived at round 2 of one work item and round 1 ran without it, and the uv venv line arrived at round 3 after two rounds each rediscovered it. Nothing recorded either. This file is what ends that.

The procedures — implement, code-review, legacy-parity — say how a role does its work. This file says what binds regardless of which procedure is running, and it is the one a prompt can cite by number.

How the sections are numbered

A section number is never reused and never re-ordered. A prompt can say §3 is narrowed this round and a round record can be compared with another one six months later, which holds only while §3 still means what it meant. A rule that retires keeps its number, and its section becomes one line naming what replaced it. A new rule takes the next number, at the end.

§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 on purpose. The failure is a habit, so the right form has to be as easy to copy as the wrong one. An orchestrator that had put this line into every prompt it wrote then broke it itself and committed the wrong value.