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Who Pays for the Remaining Work?
- Output versus completed work
- Production cost versus downstream cost
- Responsibility for uncertainty
- Reader’s responsibility checklist
Choosing Work
- Consequence and reversibility
- Smallest adequate workflow
- Bounded versus open-ended tasks
- Escalation and abstention
Building a Theory
- Existing behavior and intent
- Code, tests, history, and documentation
- Observations and hypotheses
- Understanding before modification
Specifying the Outcome
- Problem statement
- Ownership and protected boundaries
- Invariants and non-goals
- Concrete completion criteria
Verifying the Result
- Judgment versus verification
- Focused authoritative checks
- Adversarial cases
- Mechanical regression ratchets
Finishing and Handoff
- Final diff inspection
- Incidental change removal
- Compact evidence package
- Remaining work and ownership
Maintainer Economics
- Review and support costs
- Opportunity cost
- Backlog and triage burden
- Burden-reducing contributions
Project Fit
- Contribution rules
- Duplicate issues and prior attempts
- Confirmed project priorities
- Permission for broad changes
Reproduction
- Minimal failing case
- Affected versions and environments
- Facts versus explanations
- Preserved negative results
The Reviewable Patch
- Narrow diff
- Complete behavior change
- Regression coverage
- Explanation without unrelated churn
Contribution Ownership
- Review-ready evidence package
- No reviewer reconstruction
- CI and revision work
- Post-merge responsibility
Human Authority
- Named decision owners
- Separable delegation boundaries
- Integration responsibility
- Security and release authority
Comprehensible Architecture
- Explicit boundaries
- Constrained representations
- Human-readable decisions
- Resistance to generated complexity
Mechanical Governance
- Enforced invariants
- Failure-proven ratchets
- Reproducible releases
- Mechanical compatibility checks
Capability Security
- Least privilege
- Sandboxes and narrow credentials
- Trusted interfaces
- Auditable mutations
Operational Continuity
- Human-operated build and release
- Durable decisions and evidence
- Provider loss
- Maintainer succession
Change Governance
- Complexity and dependency budgets
- Discovery versus triage
- Speculative-work restraint
- Release, retirement, and incidents
Amplification Without Abdication
- Capability without transferred responsibility
- Better evidence
- Clearer systems
- Less toil for the next person