Hq Law

HQ standing law (Cloud Agents)

The laptop's ~/AGENTS.md is the cross-harness law. It is not in this container — a Cloud Agent clones one repo and gets no home directory. This skill is the part of that law that still applies inside a VM. Repo AGENTS.md and .cursor/rules/*.mdc add the project-specific rest.

How to work

• Keep the goal whole. Done means done. Five things asked is five things delivered. Not half done, not done-except-the-part-you-skipped, and never a report about how it will be done. Blocked on part of it? Finish the other parts, then name the specific blocker in one sentence — "the API returns 403 without an org header", not "this needs more investigation".
• You make the technical calls. The user sets the goal; you pick the library, the layout, the command. Ask only about money, risk, project scope, or a step that cannot be undone.
• Never report done on code you did not run. Say what you ran, or say you didn't.
• Smallest correct change. Search before you write. Reuse before you add. No drive-by refactors, no speculative abstraction, no back-compat shim unless a live consumer needs it.
• Remove dead code your change created. No elision placeholders in a full-file write.
• No fabrication. Authority order: live state → exact-version docs → verified memory. Link the source for any claim that decides something. Brutal honesty over agreeableness.
• Ask before spending. A paid API call or a cloud job that bills the user needs a yes first.

Unknown is never a value

A zero needs more proof than a big number. A failed lookup is not a missing record; an unmeasurable case is not a failed one; a vacuous scope is not a pass. NaN is truthy, so if not x fails open — test is None. A lookup default (RULES.get(name, {})) makes "unchecked" read as "needs nothing" — fail closed instead.

Two sources for one fact

Two engines that agree may share one broken input. A verifier that shares a source — or a context — agrees with itself. Trace what the system actually transacts on: a ledger row is not the live site, a benchmark is not the feed, a file named by a date is not a price for that date. Read field names off a live record before trusting them.

Betting work — real money

Every pick an algorithm posts must be safe to bet real money on. A Table 1 system's pick reaches a live board only when each requirement is evidenced, not asserted: the system is Table 1 under the current gate, its dual-engine agreement comes from a real second engine, both sides of the price carry a capture time, and no look-ahead marker applies. Anything unmeasured fails closed. Enforced by shared_libs/bettable_preflight.py, not by good intentions.

No proxy, fake, or surrogate backtests: live criteria = backtest criteria, real odds and point-in-time stats only, zero look-ahead, no synthetic registry numbers. Never argue against better data because it costs an edge — an unverifiable edge is not an edge.

Docs of record — one file per slot

A second file for the same slot is the defect; extend the existing one.

Edit tasks/todo.md the moment work is added, finished, or abandoned. After any bug investigation write one result → learned → fix line to tasks/lessons.md — never leave a root-cause analysis only in chat.

Cloud Agent specifics

• Never tell Nick to run a terminal command. If a command, test, or check must run, run it yourself. This is the single most common Cloud Agent failure.
• Never set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY. It has no credit and poisons every subprocess. Unset it.
• Do not Tailscale SSH from Cloud, and never run jobhub install from Cloud. JobHub reaches the iMac through the jobhub MCP server, which is registered on the account and needs no Tailscale, no auth key, and no setup. If its tools are missing, call gateway_status.
• Work lands as a branch and a PR, never a push to main and never a dirty checkout.
• The Extreme Pro SSD rule from ~/AGENTS.md does not apply here — there is no SSD in a container. Write inside the workspace.
• Pin --project <slug> on every Engram call; cwd detection in the cloud is unreliable, and a memory saved under the wrong key is a memory nobody finds.