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library-quality-mandate

Library Quality Mandate — Great Lib, Zero Tech Debt

Section titled “Library Quality Mandate — Great Lib, Zero Tech Debt”

Rule

Section titled “Rule”

When a project’s primary deliverable is a reusable library / shared package / submodule (consumed by other projects, not a single shipping app), it is on a zero-tech-debt budget. Every extraction, refactor, naming, and packaging decision MUST optimize for maximum reuse across current and future consumers AND new-consumer velocity at once. When these conflict with “ship faster by deferring cleanup,” the mandate wins — ship the right answer or don’t ship.

A change passes the mandate iff it is domain-neutral (no consumer-specific token in shared code), data-driven (every tunable is config or a named constant, never an inline magic literal), tested (new surface ships with coverage), charter-conformant (names describe the generic role, never one concrete instance), and documented in the same commit.

Why

Section titled “Why”

The library is the deliverable. Every consumer, extraction, and refactor serves “is this good enough that other projects ship products on it?” If quality drifts toward “good enough for our current consumers only,” the project has failed its mission. Deferred debt compounds across every downstream consumer.

How to apply

Section titled “How to apply”
  1. Decision authority — in a library-first project, agents make debt-removal calls (extract-now vs defer, rename-before-merge, relocate-leaked-token) autonomously without re-prompting; fall back to always-ask-on-unresolved.md only for calls outside these patterns.
  2. Every commit touching shared code — run the pass-test above; fail → fix before merge. Extraction tracks default to “ship now”; defer only if a downstream dependency is genuinely unbuilt.
  3. Engine-specific charter (package layout, namespace roots, asset key conventions) lives in the owning kit’s rule + the project’s CLAUDE.md — core supplies the principle; kits + projects supply concrete tokens. Full decision table + naming charter: docs/library-quality-mandate.md.
Section titled “Related”
  • rules/development-principles.md — SSOT, no silent fallbacks, no derived fields; the mandate strengthens these.
  • rules/code-conventions.md — generic naming, no magic numbers; the mandate is the library-specific elaboration.
  • rules/coding-guidelines.md — surgical changes, simplicity-first; the mandate authorizes large correct refactors (not change-aversion).
  • docs/library-quality-mandate.md — objective tests, naming-charter patterns, adoption note, history.