Engineering rules

Answer

These are the rules every change to Brew follows, from any person or session, and each one exists because breaking it hurt a brand or cost money before.

Today

Truth

1. No invented numbers, quotes, founders, reviews or backstory. Every number traces to a ledger entry or a cited source; otherwise it says "to confirm". brew/SPEC.md
2. Observed, inferred and implication stay separate; "not observed" never means "absent"; never state a rival's motive; benchmarks are labelled. brew/SPEC.md
3. An error or a check that did not run is never shown as "none", "not found" or "0". Keep error on the item and say the check did not go through. brew/CLAUDE.md
4. A Play is never evidence; proof is real data, real voice, real numbers. memory brew-proof-plain-make
5. No disclaimers or AI labels on ad creative. brew/SPEC.md

Every brand

6. A fix is done only when it works for any brand Brew could onboard, every card type, every widget and every view: platform, how it sells, market, name, how the site reads, background runs across deploys. Never a per-brand patch, hard-coded id or brand name. brew/CLAUDE.md memory feed-for-all-brands
7. Fix as product: shared cause in code, a test or audit that would have caught it, healed saved data, then deploy. A hand patch to a pack is only a stopgap and is said so. memory fix-as-product
8. Saved data heals itself: heal(), a stage or pack version bump, a load-time repair, wherever text is read. brew/CLAUDE.md memory brew-one-version
9. Add a case to test/non-shopify.test.js for every new kind of brand that breaks; add a check to tools/audit-brand-book.mjs and a guard test for every new Brand Book problem class. brew/CLAUDE.md

Dummies and production

10. Anything simulated is marked in three places: a Dummy tag in the UI, a DUMMY: comment in the code, a row in DUMMY.md. Simulated rows are never evidence. brew/DUMMY.md
11. Nothing dummy, simulated or from testing ever reaches production; the clean gate refuses a promote on any finding. memory prod-clean-only brew/db/prod-clean.mjs:1-6
12. Never re-add a cut feature without a product decision. brew/SCOPE.md

Partners and money

13. Never disconnect, reconnect or re-select Arata's Meta or Shopify connection; PROTECTED_CONNECTIONS guards it in code. Test disconnects on Cozy. memory never-disconnect-arata-meta brew/connectors/protected.js
14. Never wipe or reset the five design partners; risky tests run on Cozy or Zenant. memory brew-live-stores
15. No paid generation while only building; ask before a paid probe; never full reads just to test. memory no-spend-while-building memory feed-for-all-brands
16. Every treg call goes through treg.js; paid sources fall back to free ones; never repeat a call for data we hold. Load the brew-external-data skill before touching outside data. brew/CLAUDE.md memory treg-usage-rules
17. Cost cuts never drop Plays; make each Play cheaper. memory keep-all-moves
18. Every paid action shows its price and waits for a yes; nothing is paid twice (idempotency keys, make claims, saved job ids). brew/jam2/studio.js:1-5 brew/jobs.js:4-5
19. Paid background work runs only on the lease holder. brew/roles.js:39

Product shape

20. Read only in v1: Brew never writes to a brand's accounts or sends to its customers. brew/SCOPE.md
21. One version, then Redo it; never several options to pick from. memory brew-one-version
22. Say Plays to people; ids, routes and files may keep "move". memory brew-qa-round2-2026-10-24

Shipping

23. Run AI_MOCK=1 node --test test/*.test.js, boot locally, then deploy with ./deploy.sh from a clean tree; deploy right after a change is tested so Param can test on staging. brew/CLAUDE.md memory always-deploy-to-test
24. Commit only your own lines, push before deploying, deploy from a clean worktree of origin/main. memory brew-parallel-sessions-deploy
25. Production only through tools/promote.sh. brew/.wt-prod/docs/production.md
26. Phased work: a full QV round after each phase, three more before closing. memory brew-qv-process

Tomorrow

How we do it

1. Before a change, read brew/CLAUDE.md, SCOPE.md and DUMMY.md on origin/main.
2. Before shipping, walk this list and say in the commit which rules the change touched.
3. When a rule is broken, add the incident to the rule's source note and a guard test.

Numbers

Open

1. Should these rules be enforced in CI where possible? Proposal: yes; start with the Dummy-marker check and a ban on brand slugs in code outside tests and data.