desloplisted

# Deslop — the pass that removes rather than adds > Every story here owes an optimization pass, and until this file existed the > pass was whatever the agent felt like that afternoon. This is what one is. **The default action is deletion.** A pass that ends with more lines than it started with was a refactor, and a refactor is a different piece of work with a different risk profile. **"Started with" means the state immediately before THIS pass, not the branch point** — a story that adds a feature adds lines, and judging the pass by the whole branch diff condemns it in advance. That number is then invisible to everyone but you, so make it recomputable: commit the story's work, then commit the pass separately. Measured: an author counting honestly from its own uncommitted draft and a reviewer counting from the branch point produced a blocking CHANGES-REQUESTED and an arbitration, with neither agent wrong on its own terms. If you cannot delete anything, say so and stop — that is a complete and respectable outcome. ## The order, and why it is an order 1. **Pin the behaviour BEFORE you touch anything.** Run the relevant tests and keep the output. A green run *after* an edit proves nothing on its own: you do not know it was green before. If no test covers the area, write the narrowest one that does, and it must go red when you break the behaviour on purpose — otherwise it is not a net, it is decoration. 2. **One smell class per pass**, verified between passes. Dead