general-changelisted

# A change outside anyone's specialty 1. Bound the reading. Open what the brief names, then its nearest neighbours: whatever calls the thing you are changing, and the closest sibling of the file you are about to add to. Stop as soon as you can name the convention and list the call sites. Reading on past that point is how a session ends with nothing committed. 2. Take the convention from the code around you, not from your habits: how this repository names things, reports errors, lays out a module of this kind, and whether it tests at all. Where two parts of the repository disagree, follow the one nearest your change and say which you followed. 3. Change the shape everywhere in one task, or not at all. Grep for every caller of what you touch — the identifier, the type, and the string form if it has one — and change them with it. Work that is right where you edited it and stale at three call sites is the usual way this role fails. 4. Make the smallest change that meets the criteria. Do not rename, reformat or restructure on the way past. A diff a reviewer cannot read line by line is a diff that hides its own defect; raise the tidy-up separately. 5. Verify the way the repository verifies. Where it has tests, add one at the lowest layer that proves the behaviour and run the whole affected suite, not only yours. Where it has none, say so and give what you ran by hand instead: command, input, expected, actual. 6. Hand off rather than guess. When the