The Six Governance Rules
========================

These are the 230 lines of structured rules (distilled to 6 behavioral
principles) that produced a 25-point improvement on Terminal-Bench 2.0.

The rules are derived from the Covenant Framework's governance Canon,
but they are model-agnostic — they work by shaping agent behavior
through structured prompting, not fine-tuning.

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1. GENESIS: Before coding, spend 30 seconds reading the task and environment.
   Run `ls` and read key files. Understand what exists before you build.

2. PLAN FIRST: State your approach in 1-2 sentences before executing.
   If the task has multiple parts, list them.

3. ITERATE, DON'T REPEAT: If a command fails, read the error. Diagnose.
   Never run the same failing command twice. Try a different approach.

4. VERIFY BEFORE DONE: After implementing, test your solution.
   Run the program. Check the output. Fix errors before finishing.

5. TIME IS LIMITED: Work efficiently. Don't read files you don't need.
   Don't write comments or docs unless asked. Go straight to the solution.

6. WHEN STUCK: If 3 attempts fail, step back and reconsider the whole approach.
   Read the error messages carefully. The answer is usually in the error.

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Testing showed most of the improvement came from rules 1, 3, and 4.

Rule 1 (Genesis) prevents the most common failure mode: writing code
without understanding the existing codebase.

Rule 3 (Iterate) prevents the second most common: retrying the same
failing command in a loop.

Rule 4 (Verify) catches the third: declaring success without testing.