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The engagement floor

The engagement floor is one rule with teeth: no ad-hoc coding. Work becomes a story or a bug with acceptance criteria before it becomes a diff.

What it enforces

Section titled “What it enforces”
  • A request (a CR or RFC) is not work until refine decomposes it into sized units - the two-backlog rule.
  • A commit that touches delivery-relevant files is attributed to the unit it delivers, so an understated Affects - a change that quietly touches more than its story admits - is caught rather than shipped invisibly.
  • A subject naming more than one work item carries a Refs: trailer per owning id, so the floor can attribute the change per unit.

Why a floor and not a guideline

Section titled “Why a floor and not a guideline”

Under time pressure, the tempting move is to “just make the change” and paper over the process afterwards. A guideline that relies on the agent remembering it fails exactly when it matters. The floor is mechanical: the commit gate refuses a change with no unit behind it and names the fix, so the discipline does not depend on good intentions at the moment of stress.

It scales down

Section titled “It scales down”

The floor is not maximal ceremony for everything. A small repo can run a lite profile that collapses the pipeline to PRD → story → implement; a change flows at the weight it warrants. What the floor guarantees is not heaviness - it is that something sized and reviewable stands behind every diff.

See also

Section titled “See also”