ratchet

Your agent reads the rules. This checks whether it followed them.

A ratchet turns one way. Complexity in your codebase goes down or stays flat, unless someone deliberately turns it the other way and writes down why.

Every minimalism ruleset for coding agents is an open loop. You inject *prefer the standard library, do not add dependencies, keep the diff small*, the model reads it, and then nothing checks whether any of it happened.

Compliance is assumed. When the model drifts, which it does over a long session, nobody finds out until review.