Standard: Engineering Quality

The mesh's standing quality bar. Every project — a save editor, a prompt engine, a games farm, a story farm — holds to the same floor: clean, correct, finished work, documented and tested, with no rough-in left for "later". This is the value the projects state in their own words ("no hacks, no temporary fixes"; "do the long work"; "best craftsmanship, always"); this standard makes it shared and checkable.

Canonical, project-agnostic standard. Its companion is testing.md (proof) — this one is about the bar the code and the work are held to.

The rules

1. No hacks, no temporary fixes, no bad fallbacks. Prefer the correct, clean solution even when it's the longer route. If the only path you can see is hacky, surface it and ask rather than commit it. A silent workaround is worse than a stated blocker.
2. Do the long work — no rough-in, no "clean it up later". Big features are built as phases, one finished body of work at a time — designed, built, reviewed, tested, documented — before the next begins. A phase that is 90% done is not done. When work is deep, plan it across more phases, not fewer, and put the hours into each. Comprehensive-and-right outranks soon.
3. Best craftsmanship, always — proportionate, never absent. From the smallest utility to the largest system, the work is genuinely well made: clear structure, honest naming, care visible in the result. "It's only a small thing" is not licence to phone it in.
4. Clean, modern, modular, focused code. Small focused units, clear boundaries, no needless duplication, current idioms for the stack. Structure the code so the next person (or the next session) can reason about it.
5. Full documentation + doc-comments. Public surfaces carry doc-comments; the project's docs explain how it's built and used, kept current (see docs-lifecycle.md and, for the docs site, docs-site/). Undocumented cleverness is a liability.
6. Fearless refactoring, behind the test gate. Improve structure whenever it pays — and when you do, update the tests with it (testing.md); the green suite is what makes a refactor safe rather than a gamble. Don't leave known-worse structure standing out of fear.
7. Fidelity to the source of truth. Where the project stewards someone's data or a real format, change only what the task requires and leave the rest exactly as it was (pse2's byte-exact save fidelity is the sharpest case; the principle — don't rewrite/normalize/reorder what you weren't asked to — is general). Corrupting the user's data is among the worst outcomes.
8. UX is not negotiable where there's a user. No clunky, janky, or interrupting behaviour; the polished result is the bar, not a nice-to-have.

The ship contract — what a "release" means by default

A ship (a release) is, by default and every time, not just the code diff. The same act also:

• Drives OpenSSF Scorecard toward its max, and never below a ≥ 7.0 floor. A release that would drop the repo under 7.0, or that leaves easy points on the table, isn't finished — close the gap or record why it's capped (solo-capped checks like Code-Review/Contributors are a legitimate reason; an un-configured check is not).
• Removes tech debt as part of shipping. No stale dependency PRs left hanging, no deprecation warnings, no skipped/quarantined tests, no TODO/FIXME/SAST-baseline additions riding along silently. If the release can't clear a debt, it names it (a manifest/notes gap with a due), never leaves it unremarked.
• Triages every open PR — each is merged or closed with a reason (a Dependabot bump that contradicts a deliberate target is closed, with the reason; the rest go through the full-CI-before-main gate). Handle Dependabot with judgment, never blind-merge — see dependencies.md.

This is the "by default" bar, not a heroic extra: the point is that shipping is a whole act, so that a green build never stands in for a finished release. It pairs with the release gates in git-workflow.md (full CI before main + the manifest gate) and the security floor in supply-chain-hardening.md. Break any real request — owner, fairyfox-system, or a task the agent sets itself — into as many phases as it needs and name them up front (planning.md); under-phasing is how ship work gets lost.

Verify (is it being followed?)

The per-standard slice the compliance audit aggregates — done/partial/missing: