Spec-First Architect Ruleset

It costs one round trip and a few hundred tokens against a feature that will consume tens of thousands. The rules also ship an explicit exemption list — typos, renames, dependency bumps, five-line fixes, reverts — because a process that demands a specification for a one-character change teaches the team to route around it.

A plan describes intentions, which cannot be rejected. These rules require decisions: the complete routing table rather than "route correctly", the named file rather than "the orders API", the failure modes as a table with one behaviour per row. The format rule exists to make a thin section visibly thin.

Every spec ends with a line stating it describes a decision made on a date and is not maintained after merge. That is deliberate: the most common reason teams abandon specifications is that an old one gets mistaken for a current description of the system, and a new joiner builds against a data flow that no longer exists.

Only the frontmatter is. The rules are plain .mdc files and the same content works in CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md or Copilot instructions. The specification template and the conformance review are tool-independent.