adr-sml/CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md — operating instructions for Claude Code

Read this first

1. AGENTS.md is the source of truth for this project. Read it in full before your first edit in any session. It carries the locked decisions, the credential register, the open questions, and the full history.
2. You are required to maintain AGENTS.md under the constitution written at the top of it. Update Current Truth in place; append to the Change Log, newest first; never edit a past entry; never delete history. Record decisions and plans, not only executed work. Stamp facts [verified YYYY-MM-DD] or [assumed].
3. Update it at the end of every working session, not only when something ships. A session that produced a decision and no code still produces a Change Log entry.
4. Read AGENTS.md §12 Standing Reminders at the start of every substantial session and surface anything live to Pouya. These are decisions he parked deliberately, not settled matters — R1 in particular is his explicit instruction to keep raising the licensure wording. A parked decision that stops being raised has quietly become permanent, which is the failure mode §12 exists to prevent.

The one rule that matters more than the code

This is Pouya's public marketing surface, and the site it replaces carried fabricated credentials. No factual claim about him, his credentials, his experience, or his practice may appear on a public page unless it is in the Verified table in AGENTS.md §4.

(§4 does not verify licensure either way — so do not describe him as "licensed", or as a "legal professional", anywhere, this file included. State the reason for the rule, not a credential the register cannot vouch for.)

If a page needs a fact you do not have:

• Do not infer it from context.
• Do not soften it into something defensible ("extensive experience", "years of").
• Do not carry it over from the old site — the old site contained a fictitious founder, invented matter values, and a fabricated testimonial.
• Leave TODO(pouya): <the exact question> in the source, and add the question to AGENTS.md §9. A build that fails on an unanswered question is a correct build.

Read the Forbidden table in §4 before writing any statistic, number, or superlative.

How work is executed here

Pouya is the architect. He makes the decisions and hands you the task. You implement, then you adversarially review your own work before calling it done. This is the standing agreement — it applies to every substantial change without being restated in the prompt.

Run /build <task> for any substantive change. It encodes the loop:

1. Plan — read AGENTS.md (including §12 Standing Reminders, and surface anything live), read the governing specs, name the decisions the task touches, and stop and ask on any conflict. A blocked build is a correct build.
2. Implement — following the conventions below.
3. Adversarial review — invoke adversarial-reviewer on the diff. D20: claims-auditor does NOT run per step. It runs once, at cutover, over the whole finished site.
4. Resolve — fix each finding or decline it with a stated reason. Re-review material fixes.
5. Verify — run the checks. Never report a check as passing that you did not run.
6. Record — append the AGENTS.md Change Log entry.

/review runs phase 3 alone. /wrap runs phase 6 at session end.

Agent definitions load at session start. An edit to .claude/agents/*.md does not reach the session you made it in — the brief in force is the one that was on disk when the session began. After committing a change to one, restart before relying on it, and say in the report which version actually ran. Found 2026-08-30: the gloss lens was added to claims-auditor and the agent then reconstructed it from the AGENTS.md Change Log rather than having it in its brief, which is luck, not process.

Think deeply before acting. Extended thinking is on by default for this project (.claude/settings.json), and /build and /review request it explicitly. The planning and review phases are where it earns its cost — a defect reasoned out before implementation is far cheaper than one found after.

Why the review is adversarial, and what would break it

Two rules make the difference between a review and a rubber stamp:

Do not brief the reviewers on why your work is correct. Give them the diff and the specs, nothing else. Your rationale anchors them, and an anchored reviewer produces agreement rather than review. They must form an independent view from the artefact — that independence is the mechanism.

The reviewers are instructed to treat uncertainty as a defect. They will sometimes be wrong, and that is the intended trade. Explaining why a finding is mistaken costs minutes; a missed defect on this project's public marketing pages costs considerably more — the site this replaces carried fabricated credentials, and that is the standard being corrected. Do not read a finding as an accusation, and do not argue a reviewer down — either fix it, or record the reason you declined it so a later reader can see the judgement was made rather than missed.

Two reviewers, because they catch different things — but they no longer run at the same time. adversarial-reviewer reads the code. claims-auditor reads the copy against the §4 register and knows nothing about whether the code is elegant. A generic reviewer consistently under-weights the professional-conduct check, which is the highest-stakes failure mode on this project — so it keeps its own pass rather than being folded into the code review.

D20, 2026-08-30 — the claims pass moved to cutover. Per step it is adversarial-reviewer alone. claims-auditor runs once, over the whole finished site, as a blocking item on docs/06's cutover checklist. Pouya's reasoning, and it is a calibration and not an erosion: nothing has shipped, so every claims finding so far has been about a page no visitor can reach — the risk is deferred to cutover anyway, and one pass over twenty finished pages catches more than nine passes over drafts, because it sees the site as a reader does. The /med-arb/ ADRIC gloss is the proof: no individual claim was false, the defect was adjacency, and adjacency does not exist until the pages sit next to each other. The code reviewer stays per step because what it catches compounds — an accessibility or crawlability defect propagates into the next page built on it, and a claims defect does not; it sits there until someone reads it.

What it costs is recorded in AGENTS.md D20, not summarised away here. Read it before proposing any further relaxation: claims-auditor has caught defects that would have been serious on a live page, and D20 accepts that such a defect may now live in an unpublished draft for weeks. Two things carry that risk in the meantime — npm run check:claims, which is unchanged and runs on every build and both deploy paths, and Pouya reading the copy as it is built. Neither is optional, and neither is a substitute for the cutover pass.

Commands

npm install
npm run dev        # local dev server
npm run build      # static build to ./dist
npm run preview    # serve ./dist locally
npm run check      # astro check — type and template errors
npm run check:claims  # §4 Forbidden, enforced on dist/ — run it after a build
npm run lint       # eslint + prettier check
npm run format     # prettier — rewrite files in place
npm run deploy     # build + deploy from this machine (see docs/06)

Where things live

AGENTS.md              living project record — read first, maintain always
docs/                  the specs you build from
  01-architecture.md   sitemap, URL map, per-page content outline
  02-design-system.md  tokens, type scale, motion, contrast constraints
  03-content-spec.md   voice, copy rules, per-page copy deck
  04-seo-spec.md       metadata, structured data, sitemap, crawlability
  05-backend-spec.md   intake form, Lambda/DynamoDB/SES, booking, PIPEDA
  06-deployment.md     S3/CloudFront, Gitea Actions, IAM, cutover checklist
src/
  content.config.ts    content collections — Content Layer API, NOT content/config.ts
  styles/tokens.css    design tokens — the single source of colour and scale
  styles/global.css    reset, base type, utilities
  layouts/             page shells
  components/          UI components
  pages/               routes (file-based)
  content/insights/    Insights MDX only; the config sits above, not in here
  data/site.ts         site-wide constants, nav, contact details
public/                static assets served as-is

Conventions

Framework. Astro 7.x, output: 'static' (D1 as amended). Never introduce a server runtime without a Change Log entry recording why. The major is pinned deliberately — check npm view astro version before changing it.

JavaScript. Default to zero. Reach for an Astro island only when a feature genuinely cannot be CSS or progressive HTML. If you add a client:* directive, say why in the Change Log. A <details> element beats a JS accordion.

Styling. Plain CSS with custom properties. No Tailwind, no CSS-in-JS, no utility framework. Every colour, space, and font size comes from a token in tokens.css — no raw hex values and no magic numbers in component styles.

Accessibility is a build requirement, not a polish pass. Semantic landmarks, one <h1> per page, heading levels never skipped, visible focus states, all interactive elements reachable by keyboard, prefers-reduced-motion honoured on every animation. Gold #c9a876 never sits on cream — it fails contrast at 2.10:1. See docs/02-design-system.md.

Anything a spec makes a claim about must be reachable from the repository. If the artefact lives only in Drive, in a console, or on someone's laptop, no reviewer can compare the claim against it and the claim is unverifiable by construction — not merely unverified. Commit the artefact, or commit a faithful extract with its provenance and the command that produced it.

This has cost twice. AGENTS.md Q24 was the AWS hosting guide, the only record of how the infrastructure was hand-built, living outside the repo. Q32 was the infinity mark: it was traced from the old site's loading placeholder, the source comment said so in as many words — and two adversarial review passes still could not catch that the shape was wrong, because the real artwork was not in the repo to compare against. Stating a doubt is not enough when the thing that would resolve it is unreachable. Tracked as R14.

A command that did not run is not evidence of absence. Check that a tool exists before trusting its silence, and read exit status, not just stdout. This project ran timeout 60 ls "$DRIVE" four times, got empty output each time, and reported the brand assets unreachable — timeout is not installed on macOS, so the command had never executed and the directory was fully readable all along. Empty output from a command that failed to start looks exactly like empty output from a command that found nothing. Same family as a sweep is a command, not a claim: the claim must rest on output you actually read, from a command that actually ran.

And never suppress stderr in a verification script. Pouya's convention, 2026-08-28, from verifying the deploy credential (AGENTS.md Q22). This is the rule above from the other direction, and it is the more dangerous direction: 2>/dev/null converts "it failed" into "it found nothing", and those are opposite results. His first pass at eight simulate-principal-policy checks returned empty for all eight; the suppression was hiding an InvalidInput error, and the empty output was then explained with a guess — "probably lacks the permission" — which is the answer the check was supposed to produce, arrived at without the check running. The actual cause was a zsh parameter-expansion bug: $ACCT:user/ parses :u as a history modifier and yields 327082975128ser/. Braces fixed it.

So: no 2>/dev/null in anything whose output you intend to believe, read the exit status, and when a result is empty remove the suppression and look before proposing a cause. A guessed explanation for an empty result is worse than no result, because it closes the question.

And never TRUNCATE the output of a check you intend to believe. Added 2026-08-29, from build step 5. This is the stderr rule's twin and it is easier to commit, because the command runs and the pipe looks harmless. npm run check prints its verdict as three lines — - N errors, - N warnings, - N hints — followed by a blank line. npm run check 2>&1 | tail -3 therefore returns warnings, hints and the blank line, and silently drops the errors line. It was run four times that way and reported as passing each time; astro check was exiting 1 with 10 type errors, and both deploy paths run it before the build, so nothing could have shipped. adversarial-reviewer found it.

The fix is not a bigger tail. Read the exit status — cmd; echo "exit=$?" or cmd || echo FAILED — because it is the one signal a pipe cannot silently reshape. head, tail, grep -c and | grep -i error all have the same failure mode: they turn a verdict you did not read into a verdict you assert. Same family as a sweep is a command, not a claim, and note the asymmetry that makes it dangerous — the truncation only ever hides the bad news, because the error line comes first.

Corroborated the same day, twice, in the same session and both in zsh: grep -rn $EX 'Mediator-Arbitrator' printed an option error and no matches — which reads as clean — because zsh does not word-split unquoted variables; and a digest-comparison loop using set -- $pair printed DIFFER on all five rows, which reads as "the source changed under me", because the loop body received one argument and the comparison never ran. Prefer git grep, quote or array-expand anything you pass as flags, and re-check any result whose shape is "uniformly bad".

And re-check "uniformly GOOD" too — that is the dangerous half. Added 2026-08-30. The same set -- $pair loop recurred while confirming nine restored files matched a saved copy, and this time it printed same on all nine: shasum was handed both filenames as one argument, errored, and left both variables empty, so "" = "" passed. The DIFFER version announces itself because it is alarming; a false pass is the answer you wanted and it ends the check. A comparison must assert that both things it compares exist before comparing them, and git grep silently misses untracked files — so a clean sweep across new work means nothing until the files are staged.

A parent cannot style a child component's root element. Astro does not pass a parent's scope attribute down, so <Button class="header-cta" /> compiles the parent's rule to .header-cta[data-astro-cid-<parent>] while the rendered <a> carries only <Button>'s own cid. The rule silently never matches — no error, no warning, and the CSS looks correct in the source. Wrap the child in an element the parent owns (<div class="header-cta"><Button …/></div>), or reach it deliberately with :global() from a parent-scoped ancestor. Inherited properties (white-space, color, font-*) do cross the boundary and are the exception. This cost a header CTA that was documented as hidden on mobile, was not hidden, and sat 75 px short of the right edge on desktop — both found by measurement, neither by reading. It will recur with PracticeCard, ArticleCard, and Pill.

Never write the animation shorthand beside animation-timeline. Longhands only — animation-name, animation-duration, animation-timing-function, animation-fill-mode, then animation-timeline and animation-range. scroll() and view() are not legal components of the shorthand, and Lightning CSS folds the two declarations together on minify into something invalid, which is then discarded whole. It works in npm run dev and is dead in npm run build — the worst shape a defect can take. It happened twice in one session, the second time inside the fix for the first. /build Phase 5 greps dist for it; do not remove that check.

Images. Astro <Image> with explicit width and height. AVIF/WebP with fallback. Never base64-inline an image into HTML — the old site did this with ~1 MB of logo PNGs — a figure AGENTS.md Q34 is now open against, so treat the rule as standing on its own merits rather than on that number.

Fonts. Self-hosted, subset, font-display: swap, preloaded. No Google Fonts request at runtime — it costs a round trip and adds a third-party call to a page that collects legal inquiries.

Every page ships with: a unique <title> and meta description, a canonical URL, Open Graph and Twitter card tags, and appropriate JSON-LD. See docs/04-seo-spec.md. A page without these is not finished.

A version pin is verified against the registry, never recalled. Before you write or change any dependency version, run npm view <pkg> version and pin against what it returns. One second of checking; a stale pin costs a migration. This rule exists because astro: "^5.0.0" was written from memory and was two majors stale on the day it was written — which meant shipping a framework carrying high-severity XSS advisories. The same check applies to every pin in package.json, not just the framework.

Re-check currency at each phase boundary in the build order (AGENTS.md R11), not only when something breaks.

AGENTS.md §7 is the single source of truth for operational facts. Resource IDs, regions, DNS records, credential state, service status — these live in §7 and nowhere else. Specs in docs/ cite §7; they do not restate it. Write "the region AGENTS.md §7 records", not the region. Same for bucket names, distribution IDs, DKIM tokens, endpoints, and account identifiers.

A duplicated fact is a fact that will eventually be wrong in one place, and the copy that goes stale is the one nobody re-reads. This rule exists because docs/05-backend-spec.md carried its own copy of the SES DKIM table, a correction reached §7 and never reached it, and the stale copy ended up telling an operator to delete the three records that authenticate outbound mail — under the heading "Never delete".

A measurement is a claim about your instrument until you check the instrument. This has now cost six times, and the shape is identical every time: a number that looks like a finding, from a probe nobody validated.

• timeout 60 ls "$DRIVE" — the command never ran. timeout is not installed on macOS. Empty output from a command that failed to start looks exactly like empty output from a command that found nothing, and it produced a report that the brand assets were unreachable when the directory was fully readable.
• 1.23:1 for the traced mark — the bounding box of the path's coordinate hull, not of the curve. A cubic's control points sit outside it, so the box was 33% too tall while giving the correct width — which means the obvious sanity check, "does the width look right?", passes.
• "the mark renders at 24px" — the harness reported the worst-deviating instance on the page, not the instance under discussion, which was exact.
• "0 overflow at every width" — true, and it measured the document. A flex child was absorbing the deficit by being crushed to aspect 0.891. Measure the elements, not only the page.
• img.naturalWidth = 64 at DPR 1, 2 and 3 — which reads as the density ladder is not being generated at all, a shipped defect on every page. It is density-corrected by spec: a 192px file selected at 3x correctly reports 64. The files on disk were 64 / 128 / 192 all along.
• "10 distinct contexts" from grep -roh '.\{50\}X.\{50\}' dist/ | sort -u — grep -o takes NON-OVERLAPPING matches. On minified HTML a page is a handful of very long lines, so an early window eats the characters a later one needs and occurrences vanish silently. A whole shipped sentence was missing from the list. A grep -o window count is not an enumeration — to count occurrences of a string, iterate every match position, or grep -o the bare string with no context window.

So before acting on a number: say what it is a number of; confirm the command actually ran and read its exit status; and check it against a second method that cannot fail the same way — the bytes on disk, a screenshot, a hit test.

And a grep that matches is not a finding until you read what it matched. A case-insensitive sweep for LSO hit I aLSO practise; a superlative sweep for leading hit the pLEADINGs. Both on the same page on the same day. Print the match with context before you believe it.

Never name an Astro prop as. const { as = 'p' } = Astro.props detaches the Props interface from the component, and every call site silently stops being type-checked. astro check reports it only as ts(6196) 'Props' is declared but never used, which reads like lint noise. Measured: with the prop named as, <Eyebrow dot as="h9" bogusProp={1} /> compiled with 0 errors; renaming the one identifier to tag made the same probe fail correctly. Do not silence a ts(6196) with Astro.props as Props — that hides the warning and leaves the call sites unchecked, which is strictly worse. If that hint appears on any component, pass it a bogus prop before believing its props are checked.

A sweep is a command, not a claim. Any statement that a change was applied across files — a phrase removed everywhere, a path updated everywhere, a decision swept through the docs — must cite the command that proves it, and be written only after reading that command's output. Paste the grep into the Change Log entry. Three consecutive entries on this project asserted a completed sweep; instances survived all three, and one of them was inside .claude/agents/claims-auditor.md — the definition of the agent whose job is to catch exactly that. Recall is not evidence.

And sweep the VOCABULARY, not only the subject. Added 2026-08-30, from the Q.Arb amendment. git grep 'Q.Arb' is line-anchored, so it could not find ten lines in docs/03 that were entirely about Q.Arb and never named it — an unstruck, imperative block still instructing the struck form, eleven lines below that change set's own strike notice on the same bullet. The sweep was a real command and its output was read honestly. It was still the wrong command.

So after sweeping the term, sweep the words its claims are made of — here, the stage vocabulary (commenced, in progress, pathway, not yet) with no mention of the designation. This is R8's sharpest edge, and it is the one that survives an honest reader: a sweep can pass every test in the rule above and still miss everything, because the anchor you chose is not the anchor the text uses. The same session also excluded docs/reference/ as "sourced extracts" — half right. The quotations there are evidence; the commentary around them is this repository's voice, and three lines of it still asserted the struck row.

check:claims IS FROZEN. It is a tripwire, not a program. Pouya's ruling, 2026-08-30. Round 2 of the Q.Arb amendment found five defects in round 1's own fixes to that script, two of which made it worse than before the pattern existed — a dedup key that reported two breaches of the same string as one (the check truncating its own output), and a collapsed-text view whose window leapt paragraph boundaries onto approved copy while its comment claimed it could not. At that point it was generating defects at roughly the rate it caught them.

The rule, and it has no exceptions:

• A pattern is added only after a real breach has reached dist/. Never speculatively, never to close a gap you can imagine.
• Each addition ships with a probe — an injected page proving it catches the actual breach — and a negative fixture proving it stays silent on the approved copy nearest to it.
• No refactors. No coverage improvements. No tidying. If a pattern is wrong, change that pattern deliberately, with a Change Log entry. Do not rewrite the scanner around it.

Under D20 this script is the only per-step claims control, which is an argument for keeping it correct, not for growing it. It catches the §4 breaches that are greppable and makes no claim about the ones that are not.

Comments record decisions, not history — D19. "X because D13" stays. "This was Y, then flagged, then became X" belongs in the AGENTS.md Change Log, which is where a reader looks for how something got here. A comment longer than the code it explains must justify itself. Trim on sight.

Pouya's ruling, 2026-08-28, on his own measurement: 342 lines added to src/ in one session for 8 functional lines, and four of that session's review findings were stale statements living inside those comments. A comment that narrates its own revision history becomes a second record to keep true, and then a source of defects about the record rather than about the site.

This does not license deleting a comment that carries a live constraint. The parent-scope trap, the animation-timeline minifier defect and the as-prop hazard above are load-bearing and stay. The test is whether a future reader needs it to avoid breaking something — not whether it is interesting.

Commits. Conventional Commits (feat:, fix:, docs:, chore:, refactor:). One logical change per commit. Never commit secrets, .env files, or AWS credentials. Gitea is not an AWS OIDC provider, so the deploy key is designed as a static IAM access key to be held in Gitea Actions secrets — whether it has actually been provisioned is AGENTS.md Q22. It must never reach the repo.

Performance budget. Lighthouse ≥ 95 on all four categories, on mobile, for every page. Under 100 KB of JS on any route. LCP under 2.0 s on a simulated Slow 4G connection. Treat a budget breach as a failing build.

Lighthouse cannot currently be run. @lhci/cli was removed on 2026-08-26 (it carried 7 high-severity advisories, 0.15.1 is latest, and it had no pages and no lighthouserc to work with). The budget stands; the instrument is missing. It is re-added at build step 7 under AGENTS.md R11 — with a freshly verified pin, not on the assumption that 0.15.1 is still the ceiling. Say "not run — tool unavailable" rather than silently omitting it. A documented control that no longer exists is precisely the defect Q22 turned out to be.

What "done" means for a page

• Copy written from docs/03-content-spec.md, every claim traceable to AGENTS.md §4
• No TODO(pouya) left unlogged in §9
• Unique title, meta description, canonical, OG/Twitter tags, JSON-LD
• Semantic HTML; keyboard navigable; reduced-motion honoured
• Lighthouse ≥ 95 mobile, all four categories — UNAVAILABLE until step 7 (see the performance budget above). Report it as not run; do not tick it
• Renders correctly with JavaScript disabled
• AGENTS.md Change Log entry appended