MR-9 — Don't invent invariants
A subagent (or a human in agent mode) must not propose a new invariant without a spec citation or an explicit human ratification. The bootstrap prompt enforces this for the initial set; the planner enforces it for new ones surfaced mid-project.
The signal that you’re inventing: you can’t point to a line in
docs/spec/ or a sentence the human said in conversation that the
invariant ratifies. If you can’t, it’s not an invariant — it might be a
convention (which goes in CLAUDE.md “Conventions specific to this
repo”) or a style preference (which goes in .editorconfig or
similar).
Return to the meta-rules index.