Block shape

Sections in this order. Omit any section with nothing that passes its rule — never write an empty one. Admission rules: best-practices.md.

1. Orientation — three or four sentences: what this is, the stack, where planning and deeper docs live.
2. Policy — what the org requires.
3. Where things are — entry points, and pointers to children and linked files.
4. Running and verifying — the right commands to run and the required tool versions, plus what package.json, pyproject.toml, a Makefile, or CI config does not already say.
5. Conventions that differ from defaults
6. Known pitfalls

Terse imperative lines under plain headings. No prose beyond Orientation, no introduction, no summary. A bare fact appears only as the justification clause of an instruction — "Exclude vendor/ from searches, it is 60% of tracked files", never "vendor/ is 60% of tracked files". A prohibition names the alternative. At most two emphasis markers in the whole block.

Worked example

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## acme-billing

Payment processing for Acme storefronts. TypeScript/Node, pnpm, Postgres. Planning lives in `docs/planning/`, tickets in Linear (ACME board).

## Policy

- Never push to main; PRs only, one approval.
- Never modify `legacy/` — frozen, being replaced. New work goes in `src/`.
- Never hand-edit `src/generated/` — run `pnpm codegen`.

## Where things are

- Webhook handling: `src/routes/webhooks.ts`; conventions in `docs/webhooks.md`
- Writing a migration? Read `docs/db-rules.md` first — ordering, transaction boundaries, pool limits.
- Billing service has its own guide: `services/billing/AGENTS.md`

## Running and verifying

- Run single test files while iterating; the full suite takes ~11 minutes.
- Integration tests need `docker compose up -d` first, and fail confusingly without it.
- CI also runs `pnpm typecheck`, which `pnpm test` does not cover.

## Conventions that differ from defaults

- Money is integer cents (`amountCents`), never floats — `src/lib/money.ts`
- All DB access goes through repositories in `src/repos/`; never call the client directly.

## Known pitfalls

- Stripe webhooks replay in staging every 6h — handlers must be idempotent.
- Use vitest matchers, not jest — agents repeatedly add jest syntax here.

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