golden-principles

name	golden-principles
description	**ANALYSIS SKILL** — Explains the repository's agent-first operating principles and governance invariants. WHEN: "golden principles", "agent behavior rules", "operating philosophy", "principle lookup". EXCLUDES infrastructure, code generation, troubleshooting, and diagrams.

Golden Principles

These 10 principles govern how every agent operates in this repository. They are adapted from the Harness Engineering philosophy for agent-driven infrastructure development.

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Rules

These 10 principles are the agent operating rules. Detailed explanations follow in The 10 Principles.

1. Repository Is the System of Record — all context lives in-repo
2. Map, Not Manual — instructions point to deeper sources
3. Enforce Invariants, Not Implementations — set boundaries, allow autonomous expression
4. Parse at Boundaries — validate inputs and outputs at module edges
5. AVM-First, Security Baseline Always — prefer Azure Verified Modules + non-negotiable security baseline
6. Golden Path Pattern — prefer shared utilities over hand-rolled helpers
7. Composable Workflows — small, well-bounded steps that compose
8. Human Approval at Critical Gates — explicit gates between steps
9. Adversarial Review — challenger subagents stress-test creative outputs
10. Continuous Lessons — capture observations and feed back into the system

Steps

Applying the principles to a new agent or skill:

1. Read all 10 principles before designing the agent or skill
2. For each design decision, ask which principles apply (typically 2–3 will dominate)
3. Run the per-principle test listed in The 10 Principles
4. Where a principle conflicts with an implementation choice, change the implementation — principles are non-negotiable
5. Document deviations in an ADR if a principle was knowingly relaxed

The 10 Principles

Each principle has a non-negotiable rule and a quick test for compliance. The canonical detail (full text + per-principle tests + the "How to Apply These Principles" section for agents, contributors, and code review) lives in references/principles.md. The summary list above is a one-line index; for any decision-making use, load the reference. The two sources are kept in sync — if you spot drift, update the reference and sync the summary.

Reference Index

Reference	When to Load
references/principles.md	Applying a principle to a specific design or implementation decision; running the per-principle compliance test