[knihit]

Description

Stack: 6 of 12 in the orchestration stack. Base: feat/proportional-maker-checker (#135). Depends on everything below it (#114, the memory PR, #123, #124, #135). The single-writer PR builds on this.

Projects with their own conventions were getting konductor's defaults instead.

Context / system prompt:

• context/k-core-rules.md: new "House rules" section. Konductor's defaults for formats, branching, pull requests, review mechanism and host, commit style, prose style and document structure yield, in order, to: the user's explicit request or the brief; a recorded ruling; the project's agent instruction files and the user-written entries in the project's memory (rule 11); and the conventions the codebase already shows.
• A file a project instruction file names directly takes that file's level only when it is a regular file tracked by git inside the repository (one hop; not a symlink, URL, dependency, vendored or generated path). Rule 11 gains the matching carve-out.
• The NEVER rules and the tests-pass requirement never yield. Where a NEVER rule names its own exception (user approval, explicit request, confirmation), only the user's words meet it, including a request the brief attributes to the user.
• When both rule sets ask for the same review, it runs once. Findings that only enforce an overridden default are dropped before rework and listed for the user. Adversarial and security review stay distinct from code review. Shared collisions are settled before parallel parts diverge.
• If a collision is still unsettled, the agent asks once and records the answer as an [origin:user] Ruling: memory entry. A ruling decides only its own collision; the newest dated ruling wins, and two rulings with the same date make the agent ask.
• The writing-habits sentence defers to the new section, so precedence is stated once.
• context/k-orchestrator-routing-rules.md: orchestrators copy Ruling: entries into briefs verbatim, under a line that keeps them at ruling level. A user request to remove comments or logging is attributed to the user in CONTEXT; an approved scope reduction is named there while the Do NOT silently reduce scope line stays.

Skills:

• skills/delegation-protocol/SKILL.md: when a default template line is dropped, and the scope-reduction guard.
• skills/persistent-memory/SKILL.md: the answer to a ruling question counts as dictated by the user and is saved as [origin:user] with a Ruling: prefix; a quote in a brief still does not qualify for saving. Points at the House rules categories instead of copying them.

Other:

• CHANGELOG.md: one [Unreleased] bullet. No VERSION change.

Type of Change

• Modify existing skill
• Context / system prompt update

Testing

• npm test: not run (markdown-only change).
• cd cli && make test passes (no cli/ change)
• Gate on this branch's head, and on the top of the stack (feat/strip-spawn-v2-specialists, which contains it): make build && make synth, cd cli && make test (1,873 Rust tests on the top, 0 failed), make test-skills-sh, uvx --with pyyaml pytest -q tests/ (281 passed, 1 skipped on the top), make claude-plugin-check. All pass. The House rules text is present in the synthesized core rules context.
• Benchmark: not run; the design rated it as not needed for a precedence rule.
• No new code files.

Checklist

• My code follows the style guidelines of this project
• I have performed a self-review of my own changes
• I have made corresponding changes to the documentation
• My changes generate no new warnings

Agents Affected

The core rules load into every agent.

• konductor
• konductor-mux-orchestrator
• konductor-cmux-orchestrator
• k-developer
• k-architect
• k-researcher
• k-product-manager
• k-quality-assurance
• k-tpm
• k-browser
• k-media-analyzer

Notes for Reviewers

• Review: adversarial review in rounds until 0 CRITICAL and 0 IMPORTANT findings remained (5 rounds, plus an earlier round on the first draft). Fixes cover tracked-symlink rules files, same-date rulings, the one-hop bound, house-rule-skipped findings in briefs, and the brief-relay exception. Every finding has a fix commit.
• No test checks the text or size of k-core-rules.md, so this change adds none.