Rationalizations

Excuses agents (and humans) reach for when a discipline is inconvenient. Each has a rebuttal. Skills reference this file when the temptation is likely.

"I'll add tests later"

Rebuttal. "Later" is a session that hasn't been paid for. If the test is important enough to write eventually, it's important enough to write before the code is called done — see write-failing-test-first.

"This bug is too small for a systematic debug"

Rebuttal. Small bugs get one-shot patches that create new small bugs. Systematic debugging is the shortest path even for small bugs; the ceremony is minutes, the wrong patch is hours — see systematic-debugging.

"The dependency upgrade fixes a warning, I should take it"

Rebuttal. Every upgrade is a change of behavior masquerading as hygiene. Take upgrades in their own commit, on their own session, when the task is "upgrade dependencies" — not as a side effect of a feature.

"I'll refactor and add the feature in the same commit"

Rebuttal. Reviewers can't separate the two; regressions get blamed on the feature and the refactor gets ignored. Split the commits even if it costs you two extra minutes — see clean-commits.

"The unit tests pass, so the feature works"

Rebuttal. Unit tests prove functions do what their tests say. They don't prove the route is wired, the CORS header is set, or the frontend actually calls the handler. End-to-end verify before flipping done — see adversarial-verify and Red Flag #5.

"The plan is obvious, I'll skip spec-first"

Rebuttal. If the plan is obvious, spec-first costs one paragraph and catches the one assumption you were about to make. If the plan is not obvious, spec-first is what makes it obvious — see spec-first.

"I have context now, let me do two features while I'm hot"

Rebuttal. Two half-done features is worse than one done feature. Sessions that pack extras ship them all half-done — see the incremental-progress rule in the harness doc.

"I'll delete this test, it's flaky"

Rebuttal. Flaky tests are load-bearing tests behaving loudly. Deleting one loses the signal it was trying to send. Reproduce, isolate, quarantine — see flaky-hunter. Deleting is a last resort, not a first move.

"The old code was doing X for a reason, but I don't see it"

Rebuttal. Chesterton's Fence. If you can't articulate why a piece of code exists, you can't safely delete it. Trace the reason first — see kill-dead-code.

"I'll write the changelog before I ship"

Rebuttal. Changelogs written after the fact miss the why. Write the entry as you commit — see changelog-from-diff.