precedentlisted

# Precedent A repo is a body of rulings. Every convention in it was a decision made under pressure, and the pressure is still recorded beside it. Read the rulings and most of your design questions are already answered. Guess, and you reopen a case this repo closed a year ago. Commands are in [CASES.md](CASES.md). ## Authority, highest first Where two sources disagree the higher one wins outright. Never average them. 1. **Statute** — what CI mechanically rejects. Not taste, physics. Read the workflow files and run exactly what they run. 2. **Rulings** — how a real problem was actually resolved in a merged diff. Binding even where nothing documents it. 3. **Dicta** — what the contributor doc claims. Persuasive until you check whether the code obeys it. Where it does not, the doc is aspiration, and the user should hear that. 4. **Custom** — a pattern repeated with no stated reason. Follow it, never extend it. Enforced overrules stated. Recent overrules old. ## Where the signal is Settled code teaches nothing. Read where the repo paid. - **The second fix.** A commit repairing another from the same week. How a repo behaves once caught wrong is its real philosophy: patch the call site, or move the guard to whatever owns the invariant and make recurrence impossible? - **The rule said twice.** A review objection raised on two unrelated PRs is a rule nobody has managed to encode. Written down nowhere, and the likeliest thing to bounce your change. - **The clamp.** The commit