refactor(assets): put the rules on a line budget

[protonspy]

Follow-up to #15, which merged while this was being written.

Every rule is preloaded into every request of the session on a harness that reads rules/ — so a line here is not paid once, it is paid continuously.

651 lines / 28.6 KB → 554 / 25.6 KB. No rule and no reason was removed; what went was repetition, ceremony, and prose that restated the table above it.

Where it landed

Rule	Before	After
specs.md	104	82
knowledge-base.md	104	81
delivery.md	88	62
methodology.md	73	54
tasks.md	56	49
routing.md · autonomy.md · code-search.md · project.md · verification.md	—	unchanged, already ≤55

Seven of ten now sit at or under 55 lines.

Why three do not, and what the test does about it

specs.md and knowledge-base.md are roughly half table and fenced example. Measured:

specs.md            82 total = 45 structure + 37 prose
knowledge-base.md   81 total = 46 structure + 35 prose

Structure here is blank lines, headings, the EARS pattern table, the design table, the delta example, the ADR and glossary blocks — none of it compressible without losing the thing it shows. Cutting either to 55 would leave under ten lines of prose across six sections: enough to state a rule, not enough to say why. A rule whose reason was deleted is one an agent quietly deviates from, which costs more than the bytes save.

delivery.md is at 62 with only 20 structural lines — its prose is simply dense now, and further edits re-wrap to the same line count rather than removing content.

So TestRulesStayShortEnoughToBePreloaded enforces 55 for any new rule and grandfathers those three at their current size, in both directions: a grandfathered file that grows fails, and one that shrinks below its cap also fails, with a message telling you to lower the cap. The gain gets locked in instead of drifting back.

Whether those three are worth cutting further is a judgment about the methodology rather than about bytes, and it is yours — say the word and I will take them to 55.

Verification

gofmt -l, go vet ./..., go test ./... green. A scaffolded workspace validates clean, so no rule trips a validator after the rewrite:

✓ validate: no findings

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01J54qbk8RpC2tZH8LBz6T2b