The discipline

The Atlas and the stores tell you where things live. The discipline is the handful of standing rules that keep AI-driven work honest. These are method-level and universal — they hold regardless of language, framework, or product.

1. Specs are small and independently deliverable

A SPEC is sized to be built, reviewed, and shipped as one coherent unit — not an epic. If a workitem can't be described, implemented, and verified end-to-end without dragging in half the system, it is too big: split it into SPECs that each ship on their own.

Small-and-deliverable is what makes the rest of the discipline affordable. Independent review (below) is only practical when the change under review is bounded. A spec that sprawls can't be exhaustively reviewed, can't be cleanly reverted, and tends to hide "done-ish" work behind its own size.

Rules of thumb: one SPEC should have a single clear "this is what shipped" sentence; it should be reviewable in one focused sitting; and it should leave the project in a shippable state when it lands, not "shippable once the next three SPECs also land."

2. A SPEC is never shipped on an agent's self-report

This is the core ship-discipline rule. An agent's "I'm done" message is not evidence that the work is done. Before a SPEC is SHIPPED:

1. the implementing agent finishes its work, then
2. an independent review verifies the work against the SPEC — running the suites and exercising the change, not reading the agent's report, then
3. the change is committed.

Independent review routinely produces substantial corrections (boundary conditions, error handling, naming, test coverage, dependency layout). Skipping it — trusting the self-report — is how subtly-wrong work gets archived as "shipped." See 04-spec-lifecycle.md for the IN REVIEW → SHIPPED transition and the un-archive rule when something was shipped early.

These two are the universal core. Anything more specific — a particular error-handling pattern, a framework convention, a naming scheme — is not the framework: it's a project-specific choice that belongs in your orientation file, or a universal one that belongs in your memory store. Not here.