docs: anchor the anti-bloat lens for PRs that have no directive - #287
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The global reviewer bar is "larger than the directive's requirements justify." Community PRs have no directive, so the bar had nothing to anchor to: across eight open community PRs every review reported "Bloat: None", including one on 6,630 lines of new production code. AGENTS.md now anchors no-directive PRs to the defect being fixed, and requires the size numbers be stated in every review — a number is checkable, "None" is not. Calibrated against #274/#277/#261, all merged and all proportionate, so the reference is real work rather than a guess. Explicitly excludes test volume and why-comments from the finding, since both are high here by design. CONTRIBUTING.md is new: AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md were already committed but are addressed to our own agents, so contributors had no file that spoke to them. Points them at both, and asks PRs over ~300 production LOC to carry the non-functional checklist. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GvZKP1JeXgHFCovTaAPT5B
cnighswonger
approved these changes
Jul 31, 2026
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Problem
The global reviewer baseline flags bloat that is "clearly larger than the directive's requirements justify." Community PRs have no directive, so the bar has nothing to anchor to and the finding silently degrades to "None."
Measured across the eight open community PRs: every single review reported
Bloat / Non-Functional: None— including on a PR adding 6,630 lines of new production code with less test than code. The reviewer was following its instructions correctly; the instructions had a hole.CLAUDE.md:84already says "the reviewer-side anti-bloat lens lives in this repo'sAGENTS.md." It didn't —AGENTS.mdcontained zero mentions of bloat. This makes that pointer true.Change
AGENTS.md— for a PR with no directive, anchor to the defect it claims to fix: what is the smallest change that fixes the stated problem, and how much larger is this? Requires the size numbers be reported in every review, even when the verdict is "proportionate" — a stated number is checkable, "None" is not.Calibrated against three PRs merged today, all proportionate:
Numbers verified against the merge commits, not the PR bodies.
Two explicit non-findings, because both are high here by design and a naive lens would flag them: test volume is not bloat, and comment lines exceeding code lines is not bloat when the comment records a defect's mechanism. Every merged example above has more comment than code and all three are better for it.
Also adds an attention item (not a blocker) for community PRs over ~300 production LOC missing a
## Non-Functional Requirementssection, and instructs the reviewer to independently assessLoad-bearing?rather than accepting the author's — that classification decides whether a human reviews before merge, so an author's "no" on a wire-contract change is a blocking finding.CONTRIBUTING.md— new.AGENTS.mdandCLAUDE.mdare already committed and public, but both are addressed to our own agents; a contributor had nothing written to them. This points them at both files, explains which sections are internal, and asks for the non-functional checklist on larger PRs. It also documents things contributors currently have to infer: fork PRs don't get CI (and that's not their problem), we won't push to their branch, draft means draft.Non-Functional Requirements
AGENTS.md, 83 in a newCONTRIBUTING.md. Documentation only; no code.AGENTS.mdsection narrows an existing global rule for a case it didn't cover, and records why so it isn't "simplified" away later.Testing
Documentation only — no test surface. The calibration figures were computed from the merge commits (
540981a,5a9dac0,8b25dc9) rather than quoted from PR bodies; two of my initial numbers were wrong and were corrected against the measured values.Note
Pushed without
GIT_PUSH_GUARD_ALLOW=1. Earlier pushes today needed it because pushing by tokenized URL makes the pre-push guard resolve$1as the URL, fail to find a remote ref under it, and fall back to the empty-tree baseline — scanning all reachable history. Pushing by remote name with the token in anhttp.extraheadergives the guard its intended baseline. That was my bug, not the hook's.— Proxy Builder