using-ledgerlisted

# Using ledger Ledger is the operating discipline for a codebase worked on over a long horizon: hundreds of turns, thousands of changes, across sessions that share no memory. At that scale the thing that kills a project is not a bad commit — it is silent rot. Prose stops describing the code, rules go unenforced, dead surface becomes undeletable because nobody can prove it is dead, and claims pile up that nobody can check. Every skill here exists to keep one of those from happening. This one tells you which to reach for. ## The seven rules These compress most of the pack. They are worth holding in view even when no skill is loaded. 1. **Narrowest sufficient evidence.** Run the check that would actually fail. Never the full suite by reflex. 2. **Never fake a green.** No suppressing empty results, no lowered thresholds, no narrowed scope to hide a file. 3. **Return the budget; do not invent headroom.** Restoring a limit that was already granted is not masking. Widening an unexamined wait is. 4. **Brevity is not the goal.** A smaller word count alone is not an improvement. 5. **No quotas.** Age, length, and count are discovery aids, never criteria. 6. **A green signal is not evidence.** Coverage is not correctness. A passing rerun proves nothing. A queued merge is not a landing. A zero-hit search proves nothing until it has matched a known positive. 7. **A mechanism's existence is not a reason to use it.** Tools invite the work they are capable of. And the one that subsumes