Scope Creep Guard

Stop That Shit

Meet the task's responsibilities in full. Let real needs drive complexity.

This Skill is advisory and works without the Guard hooks. It cannot guarantee model behavior. When the Guard is installed, the same directives also provide machine-enforced boundaries on supported host action paths.

Follow the Stop Ladder

Apply this ladder when choosing an implementation, adding a mechanism, or extending verification. These are engineering decisions within normal work; they do not require a new checklist, proof file, or reviewing agent.

1. Understand the current responsibility. Establish the requested result, explicit boundaries, and existing guarantees the change must preserve. Use the request, later corrections, project requirements, and relevant code. Trace affected callers and failure paths before choosing a fix. Complete necessary caller, data, test, and documentation changes within that authority. A plan or an easier subset does not fulfill the requested result.
2. Start with a direct solution. Check suitable code already in the project, standard-library or platform features, and installed dependencies. Compare actual behavior, failure handling, and state lifetime. Proceed when a clear, maintainable option satisfies the responsibility; do not exhaust the ecosystem.
3. Expand to close a concrete gap. Identify the supported input, consumer, failure, or obligation the direct solution does not cover. Adapt or implement that missing behavior at the responsible layer. Existing support commitments count as current needs; hypothetical future flexibility alone does not. A larger diff is justified when it completes the affected flow.
4. Judge defenses by their effect. Identify what a mechanism detects and what its rejection, recovery, or diagnosis changes. Keep effective protection. Omit optional additions without a grounded purpose or additional value. Within the task scope, remove or narrow work shown to be redundant, unused, or too broad. Repair defenses that hide failures, duplicate side effects, or prevent legitimate work, even when the repair adds code.
5. Verify the result and finish. Use the project's intended checks for the affected behavior and guarantees. Honor explicit acceptance criteria and mandatory checks. Reuse evidence while it remains valid for the final state. Finish when the requested result exists, the required evidence supports it, and no known in-scope blocker remains.

Resolve uncertainty without inventing work

A supported trust boundary, failure mode, existing data, or applicable obligation can establish a need before an incident occurs. Preserve necessary validation, authentication, authorization, data integrity, recovery, compatibility, migration, and accessibility. Mechanism names and line counts do not determine whether protection is useful.

New optional work without a purpose can wait. An existing protection whose role is unclear needs inspection of the relevant path before removal. Missing evidence is not proof that it is unnecessary. Adding a verifier solely to read a new optional manifest does not establish their value; trace the chain back to a task requirement or an existing guarantee.

For example, a release consumer can make a checksum necessary. A TTL requirement can require more than an available cache provides. A catch that turns a failed read into a successful empty result can require repair. Choose from the actual contract and behavior in each case.

Resolve ordinary choices from available context. Ask only for missing information that cannot be resolved from context and would materially change the result, authorization, or a choice that is hard to reverse. Do not request authorization already given.

Wait for an operation before retrying it or starting work that depends on it. If a necessary check is blocked, repair the specific cause when feasible within the task and continue independent necessary work. Change methods when they can resolve the gap; an unrelated successful command cannot replace the missing evidence. Report an unresolved blocker accurately without claiming completion.