Project Rules

evo is a personal open-source project with specific rules to maintain its independence and safety.

The Iron Rule

No company information or sensitive data may appear anywhere in the repository:

• Company names, brands, domains, or email addresses
• Employee names or aliases
• Internal system codenames
• Intranet addresses
• Machine absolute paths (use relative paths or ~/)

Team attribution is "Paper team" only — no company identity.

Enforcement

The rule is enforced by scripts/iron-rule.mjs:

Check	When	What
pnpm test	Source tree	Tests include iron-rule scan
pnpm check	Full tree + dist/	Post-build verification

Violations fail the build. The scan checks for:

• Known company name patterns
• User home directory absolute paths
• Private IP addresses (10.x, 172.16-31.x, 192.168.x)

Adding New Patterns

If you discover a pattern that should be blocked, add it to FORBIDDEN_PATTERNS in scripts/iron-rule.mjs:

export const FORBIDDEN_PATTERNS = [
  { name: 'example:pattern', note: 'Description', regex: /pattern/i },
  // ... existing patterns
]

Why This Rule?

This project is open source and must remain independent of any corporate identity. The rule ensures:

• No accidental leakage of internal information
• Clear separation between personal and corporate work
• Safe for anyone to fork and use

Skipped Locations

The scan skips:

• .git/ — version control internals
• node_modules/ — third-party code
• .vitest/, coverage/ — test artifacts
• .paper/ — runtime data directory
• Binary files — only text files are scanned
• scripts/iron-rule.mjs itself — contains the patterns

Practical Guidelines

Paths

// Bad: hardcoded absolute path
const config = '/absolute/path/to/config.json'

// Good: use homedir() or relative paths
const config = path.join(homedir(), '.evo', 'config.json')
// or
const config = './config.json'

Attribution

<!-- Bad -->
Developed by Example Corp Engineering Team

<!-- Good -->
Developed by the Paper team.

Examples

When writing examples or documentation, use generic paths:

# Good: generic paths or ~/
export EVO_DATA_DIR=/srv/agent-memory
cd ~/projects/myapp

# Bad: absolute paths with usernames
cd /absolute/username/work/project