Golden Principles

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.

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