Authoritative Text Rules (SSOT)

Skills that audit authoritative text apply these items by reference. A runner may carry a compressed mnemonic of an item, but never the item's full trigger, sweep, concern conditions, or N/A criterion — that copied detail is the manual-synchronization surface this rule removes — and the mnemonic is never the authority. The Items index below is the single source of truth for which items exist: runners derive their active item set by reading this index, never by hardcoding a parallel slug list.

Scope

Authoritative text is text an agent executes as instructions; applying a definition file by reference is executing it, no less than running a procedure step by step. That single property decides membership, and any file for which it holds qualifies in full — a body that also describes a separate artifact, such as a wrapped script or a co-located rule table, is still audited whole as instructions.

A claim about a separate artifact, made inside a qualifying file, has a referent, and checking the claim against that referent belongs to the code-quality rule set quality-list, on its items' own triggers. An item here whose sweep reaches such a claim still audits it and reports on its own concern conditions — case-space-totality's sweep is one that does.

Skill bodies — script-wrapping ones included — rule and item definition files, and repository-level agent-instruction files (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, files under .claude/rules/, .claude/commands/, .claude/agents/, and the equivalents other tools define) are the recurring instances. The list is illustrative: the property above decides membership.

Source code is not authoritative text: a machine executes it. Prose that is read rather than executed — a README, an article, a design document, a docstring — is not authoritative text either.

Classify per file, not per directory. A skill directory can hold a skill body beside a package manifest, a lockfile, and scripts; the body is authoritative text and the rest is not.

A diff can carry both kinds. When it does, this rule set and the code-quality rule set the runner already applies both bind it in full — the classification is the set of surfaces present, not a partition. A change whose substance is code keeps its ordinary audit unchanged and gains these items for whatever authoritative text it also touches.

Ownership boundary

A statement left stranded by a qualification the diff introduces — a caveat that makes a previously unconditional documented behavior conditional, while the same behavior stays stated unconditionally elsewhere — belongs to quality-list's paired-artifact-drift item and its Qualification completeness sweep. No item here takes that case.

Items

Items carry no lane tag: every judgment below is available from the literal text of the audited files and the files they reference, so a runner splitting work between a fresh-context subagent and main context may send any item to either. A runner selects every item in this index whenever the rule set is active.

• case-space-totality
• single-reading
• clause-composition
• executor-fitness
• consumer-closure