Tutorial: Engineering Quality — the standing quality bar

Engineering Quality — the standing quality bar

The mesh's standing quality bar: clean, correct, finished work — documented and tested, with no rough-in left for "later". "No hacks, no temporary fixes"; "do the long work"; "best craftsmanship, always." This project already states the bar in its own words; adopting the standard makes it the shared, checkable floor rather than folklore.

Canonical, project-agnostic source: assets/references/fairyfox.io/hub/standards/engineering-quality.md. Its companion is proof — ../plans/testing.md (the test suite) — this note is about the bar.

The rules (and where this project already lives them)

  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 is hacky, surface it and ask (a stated blocker beats a silent workaround). This is working-agreements.md §A2 (build the solution, don't offload) applied to how the solution is built.
  2. Do the long work — phases, one finished body of work at a time. A phase that is 90% done is not done; when work is deep, plan it across more phases, not fewer. Comprehensive-and-right outranks soon. Pairs with planning.md.
  3. Best craftsmanship, always — proportionate, never absent. From the smallest DPL helper to the provider framework, the work is genuinely well made. Ties to the owner's standing working-agreements.md §A4 (prefer the higher-quality option, always).
  4. Clean, modern, modular, focused code. Small units, clear boundaries, no needless duplication — the engine/target split (working-agreements.md §A3, "don't duplicate") and the floor-up modular decompositions (Home/SingleView/Manage/listManifest/contentSafety/DPL) are this rule in practice.
  5. Full documentation + doc-comments. Public surfaces carry JSDoc; the notes explain how it's built. See documentation.md (the JSDoc house-style + doc-site) and docs-lifecycle.md role in repo-hygiene.md.
  6. Fearless refactoring, behind the test gate — and update the tests with the refactor. This is working-agreements.md §B1/§B5 (regression-test every change; don't regress quality metrics) plus ../plans/testing.md.
  7. Fidelity to the source of truth. Change only what the task requires. The sharpest case here is never corrupt or lose a user's generated images or user-settings.json (CLAUDE.md Project Preferences); the general principle is don't rewrite/normalize/reorder what you weren't asked to.
  8. UX is not negotiable where there's a user. No clunky/janky/interrupting behaviour — the polished result is the bar. This is working-agreements.md §B3 (verify UI by looking) and the CLAUDE.md preference: "keep the app feeling like polished software, not a dev tool."

Verify (is it being followed?)

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

  • No hacks / temp-fixes / bad-fallbacks shipped in place of the correct solution (read recent changes; no TODO-hack markers or silent workarounds).
  • Features land finished — built + reviewed + tested + documented — not rough-in for "later".
  • Code is clean/modern/modular/focused; public surfaces carry doc-comments; docs are current.
  • Refactors came with test updates, not test rot.
  • Source-of-truth fidelity respected: no incidental rewrites of user data / settings / images.
  • Ship contract (hub 0.21.0): OpenSSF Scorecard ≥ 7.0 holds (evidence: scorecard.yml + the security badge / working-agreements.md §B5); tech debt removed, not deferred (evidence: SonarCloud tech-debt gate + the maintenance sweep); open PRs/issues triaged as part of shipping (evidence: the pre-release gh pr list/gh issue list check per CLAUDE.md "GitHub Is Part of Default Management").

The ship contract (hub 0.21.0)

"Done" carries a floor, not just "it works": the OpenSSF Scorecard stays ≥ 7.0, tech debt is removed rather than deferred, and open PRs/issues are triaged as part of shipping — not left to rot. RAP already tracks Scorecard/Sonar/coverage as must-hold-or-rise metrics (working-agreements.md §B5/§F) and runs a maintenance sweep (maintenance-sweep.md); this names the floor explicitly. Recorded in adoption-manifest.md (ship-contract folded here).