Problem
When a design decision would put different things in their right places (separate concerns, split machine-truth from human-prose, keep a pattern's pieces in distinct homes), the fear that those pieces will drift out of sync is often treated as a reason to collapse the design. But drift is guardable: a conformance check that fails on divergence lets you keep the clean separation and the safety.
This design-decision heuristic is only partially present in the corpus today. engineering-practices carries the tactical mechanics — "keep a single source of truth … and have a test fail if it drifts" (line 11), and "point to B, don't paraphrase B" (line 12). What's missing is the higher-altitude decision reframe and one specific nugget:
- Drift-fear is not a veto on a correct separation — it's a prompt to write the guard.
- The guard ships in the pack/module that defines the pattern, so enforcement travels with the design decision wherever the pattern is reused.
Decision
Owner chose a new skill (over extending engineering-practices or adding to checks/DESIGN.md) as the home, to seed a place for design-decision judgment to accumulate.
Scope
- Add
skills/design/SKILL.md — the decision heuristic, a short decision sequence, the boundary against "duplicate freely," and one corpus-grounded example (the pack-declaration design: machine-truth in .claudinite-checks.json + hook-rendered prose, both from one declaration, guarded by the fingerprint check).
- Cross-link
engineering-practices for the drift-guard mechanics rather than duplicating them (honors the corpus's own "point to B" rule).
- Add the catalog row in
skills/README.md.
- No per-skill wiring needed — bootstrap Part 7's structural loop auto-mounts new skill dirs on re-bootstrap.
Not in scope: migrating existing engineering-practices bullets into the new skill (larger, reference-touching change; revisit as follow-up if the design skill grows).
Problem
When a design decision would put different things in their right places (separate concerns, split machine-truth from human-prose, keep a pattern's pieces in distinct homes), the fear that those pieces will drift out of sync is often treated as a reason to collapse the design. But drift is guardable: a conformance check that fails on divergence lets you keep the clean separation and the safety.
This design-decision heuristic is only partially present in the corpus today.
engineering-practicescarries the tactical mechanics — "keep a single source of truth … and have a test fail if it drifts" (line 11), and "point to B, don't paraphrase B" (line 12). What's missing is the higher-altitude decision reframe and one specific nugget:Decision
Owner chose a new skill (over extending
engineering-practicesor adding tochecks/DESIGN.md) as the home, to seed a place for design-decision judgment to accumulate.Scope
skills/design/SKILL.md— the decision heuristic, a short decision sequence, the boundary against "duplicate freely," and one corpus-grounded example (thepack-declarationdesign: machine-truth in.claudinite-checks.json+ hook-rendered prose, both from one declaration, guarded by the fingerprint check).engineering-practicesfor the drift-guard mechanics rather than duplicating them (honors the corpus's own "point to B" rule).skills/README.md.Not in scope: migrating existing
engineering-practicesbullets into the new skill (larger, reference-touching change; revisit as follow-up if the design skill grows).