obey-the-houses-own-toolinglisted

# Obey the house's own tooling ## Purpose Every mature repo owns some of its files through generators: a changelog task, a code formatter, a dependency-lock command, a license-list generator. When you hand-write one of those files instead of running the tool, the output almost never matches — spacing, ordering, category names, section shape all drift. To a maintainer that mismatch is a loud signal, and the most defensible AI-detection vector they have: it isn't about how the *code* reads, it's that you bypassed the house's own machinery. Compliance with the repo's tooling is what makes agent-assisted work acceptable in a strict house. The same root produces a second rule: "it compiles and my tests pass" is a checkpoint, not "done". The project defines "done" — encoded in its gate task (`check`, `verify`, lint, license/lock validation). Skipping it ships the miss to CI. ## When to use - You are about to produce a file the repo has a task for: changelog entry, formatted source, build config, dependency lock, license/NOTICE list. - You are about to say a change is "done" or "validated". - You matched a changelog/doc category or a title by hand instead of by convention. ## When NOT to use The file has no generator or the repo ships no gate task — then there's no house pattern to match, and hand-authoring is simply how that file is made. ## The practice (checklist) - [ ] **Read AGENTS.md first** (then CONTRIBUTING / dev-docs). It lists the exact commands — don't s