core-minimal-change-disciplinelisted

# Minimal-Change Discipline Before writing a single line, an agent operating under this skill answers one question: **"What is the smallest diff that fully satisfies the stated intent — and nothing more?"** If the answer requires touching a file not named in the plan or ticket, that touch requires explicit authorization or must be dropped. If the answer involves renaming, reformatting, or restructuring code that already works, that work is deferred to a dedicated refactoring task. There is no such thing as "while I'm here" — that phrase is the canonical signal that scope creep is about to happen. Every byte changed is a byte that can introduce a regression. Minimize the bytes; minimize the risk. ## What This Skill Is (and isn't) This skill is the cognitive operating manual for **scope discipline**: the practice of holding a firm change boundary throughout a task and actively resisting the pull to improve adjacent code that was not asked for. It applies to every phase — planning, editing, reviewing, and committing. This skill is **not** a refactoring prohibition. Refactoring is valuable. This skill says: refactoring is a separate task with its own plan entry, its own review, and its own commit. When the current task is "fix bug X", the correct action is to fix bug X and open a follow-up ticket for the cleanup you noticed. Bundling the cleanup into the bug fix makes the diff harder to review, harder to bisect, and harder to revert. This skill is **not** a code-quality veto