Adopts ideas/token-conservation.md, parked 2026-07-28, plus the disciplines
the human added: read the compressed form first, discover by mechanism,
shrink output at the source, never pay twice for the same bytes.
docs/context-economy.md owns all of it and leads with a floor, because
every cheap failure mode is also a token saving — skipping the owning doc,
guessing a signature, reporting from a diff, thinning a test — and each has
already cost this repo a defect. Frugality is for presentation and
discovery, never for the artifact or the evidence.
Mechanical, not remembered:
- scripts/surface.sh generates docs/surface.md — every top-level
declaration with its line, 261 lines standing for 3757 of source. The
pre-commit hook regenerates and stages it, so it cannot be stale, and
verify.sh compares independently for a clone that never set
core.hooksPath. The hook refuses a commit with unstaged .go changes,
since what it generated describes the working tree, not the commit.
- verify.sh --quiet: 48 lines of gate output become 1. The hook uses it.
- CLAUDE_LOC_MAX=150, the only budget billed per turn rather than per read.
Both new gates were watched failing before being kept: a doctored
surface.md, and CLAUDE_LOC_MAX temporarily set to 5.
state.md's inventory loses its LOC column. It had already drifted on six
files (content.go 381→450, render.go 447→454, web.go 206→217, check
216→223, watch 129→137, chrome 105→110) which is what a number written in
two places does; the generated file owns sizes now, the table owns purpose.
The subagent question is recorded there as the one open decision, with the
case for and against written out in the idea file.
ADR-0040 puts the dependency approval on the record, as hard rule 2 requires: the
standard library decodes JPEG, PNG and GIF but cannot resize, and image/draw
scales only by nearest neighbour, which is visibly wrong on the photographic
downscales this site is made of. Four modules against a cap of six, no transitive
dependencies, and WebP decoding comes along. AVIF still has no decoder anywhere,
so it will pass through untouched.
ADR-0041 raises CORE_LOC_MAX 2000 → 2800. The old figure was costed before any
code existed, for the spine and the render path, and never budgeted what cmd/ will
hold: `check` ~250, `new` ~100, `-dev` ~100, change detection ~100, page cache
~200. On a core already at 1870 that is ~2620 before anything optional, so the gate
was going to fail work nobody would call excess. A costing error corrected, not
discipline loosened.
The ADR and HARNESS.md both say what a *second* raise would mean: that something
belongs in internal/ext/. Two ceilings exist so "core stops growing, ext rises" is
observable, and that stops being true the moment leaves are let into core.
Claude Opus 5andbdeshi