- Assigned tasks, acceptance criteria, and approved epic items define scope. Aspirational adjectives do not authorize adjacent work.
- Initiative means continuing to implement, review, verify, and land approved work; it does not mean inventing work.
- Surface material architecture, line-count, or subsystem expansion outside explicit requirements with evidence before proceeding.
- Prefer the smallest idiomatic Rust design that satisfies the requirements. Do not buy marginal completeness with disproportionate complexity.
- Reasoning effort changes depth, never scope. Open-ended exploration requires an explicit request.