Make delivery size proportional to risk

[capituwuistgoonsquad]

Outcome

Make risk, rather than arbitrary smallness, determine the size of future delivery slices.

Rule clarification

• Smaller slices are required when uncertainty, irreversibility, security boundaries, external evidence, or rollback blast radius prevent safe combined validation.
• Larger cohesive slices are preferred when work is low-risk or read-only, uses proven contracts, shares one rollback and validation boundary, and splitting would produce preparatory plumbing instead of usable progress.
• File counts, line counts, and a general preference for small PRs do not justify splitting.
• Larger slices must still remain cohesive, reviewable, and free of unrelated refactors.

Scope

Only the authoritative root AGENTS.md changes. This standalone governance update is intentional because the maintainer explicitly requested the clarification before future project work.

Validation

• git diff --check
• Commit includes DCO sign-off
• No runtime tests required for an agent-documentation-only change

Greptile Summary

This change clarifies delivery-sizing guidance in AGENTS.md, directing authors to use risk, validation, rollback, cohesion, and reviewability boundaries rather than arbitrary file or line counts.

A representative low-risk cohesive change and an irreversible change requiring external evidence were evaluated against the revised guidance. The low-risk case permits a larger cohesive slice, while the irreversible case requires a smaller independently provable slice. The potential for contradictory sizing instructions was disproved by the executed check, which found no conflicting direction. No defects were found.

Confidence Score: 5/5

Safe to merge: the documentation guidance is internally consistent for the representative low-risk and high-risk delivery scenarios tested.

The only changed file is repository guidance, and the executed check confirmed that its constraints produce compatible sizing decisions rather than contradictory instructions.

Files Needing Attention: None.

T-Rex Logs

What T-Rex did

• Ran the deterministic delivery-sizing checker against HEAD^ and HEAD and confirmed that the baseline did not include the revised rule while the revised guidance output showed all expected constraints and contradiction-evidenced=no with exit code 0.
• Observed HEAD results showing both representative cases passed and contradiction-evidenced=no with exit code 0, and confirmed the check completed without modifying tracked repository files.

_{Ran code and verified through T-Rex}

_{Reviews (1): Last reviewed commit: "Make delivery size proportional to risk" | Re-trigger Greptile}