graft

# graft ## Purpose External code intelligence — structured workflow for learning from, adapting, and integrating features from any public repository into your project. Graft is NOT a copy-paste tool. It enforces understanding before adoption through a mandatory challenge gate that evaluates license compatibility, stack fit, scope, quality, and maintenance health before any code touches your codebase. ## Core Rule: The Tree is a Menu, Not the Meal When you clone a repo you see hundreds of files. **That tree is a menu — options to order from, not a meal to eat.** Grafting the whole tree is how context windows die and foreign patterns leak into your codebase. - Read the README + the **2-5 files that implement the target feature**. Skip the rest. - If you cannot name the specific files you need before reading, you do not know what you want yet — go back to Step 0 and narrow scope. - `WebFetch` on raw GitHub URLs beats `git clone` whenever you know the exact files. Use clone only when discovery is genuinely needed. **Reading to understand is not grafting.** The discipline above caps the **graft scope** — the files you actually transplant, port, or improve into your codebase (2-5, hard-cap 10). It does NOT cap how many files you may *read to learn a pattern*. Studying a 24-skill library to extract one convention legitimately reads dozens of files but grafts almost none. Keep the two counts separate: a wide read with a narrow graft is thorough; a wide graft is the failure mode...