Write and edit source files with Write/Edit, never through bash heredocs or python -c string surgery. Use when creating or modifying any code file. Prevents escaping corruption that silently breaks the file you just wrote.
Use the moment the user corrects something, pushes back, repeats an instruction, or says that is not what I meant, no I said, I told you, you keep, stop doing, or every time. Turns a correction into a durable change in the smallest place that will hold it,…
A limit that counts by name misses things that share a cause. Group by what decides the outcome, not by how the source labels it. Use for concentration caps, diversification, retries, test coverage, and any "at most N of these" rule.
Activate when the user asks for creativity, invention, or ambition: "be creative", "creative mode", "think bigger", "innovate", "surprise me", "don't be literal/basic", "come up with something", "what could this be", "make it special", "add cool stuff", or…
Use before telling the user anything is done, fixed, working, shipped, deployed, or passing, and use at the start of any multi-step task to state what finished will look like. Defines what counts as evidence for a web page, a script, a scheduled job, a…
List the whole option set before picking from it. Ranking a subset you happened to load is not selection, it is accident. Use before choosing a best candidate, and whenever the pool comes from a file list, glob, or pipeline step that could quietly be short.
Make failures visible instead of silent. Use when writing exception handling, truthiness checks, resource lifecycles, or any lookup that can return nothing. Prevents bugs that present as working code.
Treat the age of every input as part of its validity. Use whenever reading cached files, scraped captures, stored prices, stats, or history that a later step will act on. Prevents confident output computed from stale data.