starting-conditionslisted

# Starting conditions Starting conditions are the decisions that are cheap now and expensive later: what the artifact is, what language it is written in, and what a machine will refuse to let through. Set them once, in writing, before the first line. Everything after is downstream of them. Your job here is **conversational**. Interview the owner, then write. Do not open with a draft contract — a contract written from assumptions gets ratified, not corrected, and the assumptions ship. ## The three outputs 1. **`RULES.md`** — the contract. What we're building, the language, the gate, the enumerated rules, the behavioral spec, the measured baseline. 2. **One gate command** — `make check`. It is the CI, the pre-commit hook, and the definition of done. If there are two commands, there is no gate. 3. **A measured baseline** — what the gate says about the repo *today*, before anyone fixes anything. ## Procedure 1. **Interview.** Work `references/interview.md` in order. Do not skip to tooling; the first two questions decide the rest. Stop and ask when an answer is vague — "good test coverage" is not an answer, "≥85% lines, in-process" is. 2. **Sort every rule into machine-checkable or not.** This is the load-bearing step. Anything a tool can check becomes a gate step; only what tools cannot see stays a prose rule, and each of those gets a budget. 3. **Write the contract** from `assets/contract-template.md`. 4. **Build the rig** — `references/rig-cookbook.md