The first cut opened "NOT YOURS TO CALL UNPROMPTED", and that is the wrong
instrument. A caller reading a prohibition stops NOTICING rule-shaped things
rather than noticing them and asking — which trades a small failure for a
larger one. The wanted behaviour is more proposals, not fewer.
So both docstrings now describe the practice: propose readily, state the
four things, and close with a question the operator answers in one word —
approve it as written / let's talk about it / no. Named options where the
interface has them, three written-out options where it does not.
"Approve it as written" is what makes element 1 load-bearing: they approved
TEXT, so that text is stored verbatim. "Let's talk about it" is framed as
the expected answer rather than a setback. "No" routes the observation to
create_note, which records without binding.
The argument for asking is also better than consent. The operator's yes is
the one moment the rule is certainly in front of them: afterwards a
conditional rule is not read aloud at session start, and a project rule is
absent from an unfiltered list_rules(). The proposal IS the review.
Guard gains the answers-offered-back element and drops the wording that
forbade; its header records why the framing changed, so the prohibition does
not get reintroduced as a tidy-up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
Every gate on create_rule and create_project_rule was about SHAPE — rule vs
process vs snippet, one-thing-you-could-violate, general-enough, not-a-dupe.
All of them improve a rule someone has already decided to write. None asked
the prior question: has the person this will bind agreed to be bound by it?
Both docstrings now open with the gate, and with the four things a proposal
carries: what it would require in the words it would carry, its intent, why
now, and how it would be enforced.
The fourth is the one that decides it. "A test, a CI check, a hook, a schema
constraint... or nothing" is a question that sometimes dissolves the rule:
what a test can assert should BE that test, and a rule is what is left when
nothing mechanical can hold the thing. A rulebook grows by default and
shrinks only on purpose.
create_project_rule needs the gate more, not less, and says so: a project
rule is absent from an unfiltered list_rules(), and a conditional one is
absent from session start too, so one written there can bind for months
without ever having been in front of the person it binds.
test_rule_creation_asks_first pins structure, never wording — each element
matches a family of synonyms, and the gate must precede the Args: block,
because a caller who has decided to make the call reads the parameters and
not the prose under them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5