Apply the documentation voice rules to CONTRIBUTING.md and the agent docs

[techmanual-ai]

What changed

This finishes the documentation voice pass. CONTRIBUTING.md, docs/agent_docs/readme_agent.md and docs/agent_docs/agent_development.md were the last prose docs not yet checked against agent_development.md §7 (Documentation Voice). The section exists, so the task applied. I only fixed text that breaks one of its rules.

• Em-dashes (§7.9): these went from 32 to 1. Most were dashes between a label and its definition (**\README.md`** — what LabLink is…, Update docs — …, stateless — it receives…). Each became a colon, a verb or a full stop. The one left in CONTRIBUTING.md` ("Register it — one line in each of…") marks a real turn. The four inside the quoted Before examples in §7 are there on purpose.
• Slogan sentences: I removed three sentences that only repeated the line before them:
  • "One server, many protocol drivers, one install."
  • "This is a living, two-way document."
  • "This document is the codified collective memory."
• Overview sentence: I removed the opening of CONTRIBUTING.md that only listed what the document covers (§7.3/§7.5).
• §7 itself: the rule against rhythmic writing contained an "X, not Y" closer: "is a rhythm, not a fact pattern". It now says: "is a rhythm, and facts rarely come in threes that reliably." I checked the rest of §7 against its own rules and changed nothing else.

Where precision won over voice

readme_agent.md and agent_development.md are instructions an agent has to follow. Where a smoother rewrite would have made a rule less exact, I kept the exact version:

• "Not X" prohibitions stay. Each one rules out something agents really do, so it isn't the empty contrast §7.2 targets:
  • "release-note tone, not as a session diary"
  • "a backstop, not permission"
  • "a bug, not a flake"
  • "discovered … never assumed"
• Bolded field labels stay. Purpose, Your responsibility, Framework, Mocking and the rest are labels the reader scans for, which §7.8 allows. Removing them would also have changed the structure.
• Directives stay directives. Where a dash came before a command, the command became its own sentence instead of being folded into a clause, e.g. "…or the wrong type. Return a structured error." and "…are settled. Do not revisit them…".

Not changed

• Every heading, code block and table in the three files is byte-identical to main, which I checked with a diff. No rule or contract changed.
• Sections that already read cleanly were left alone, including §2, §4 (apart from one dash), §5 and §9 of agent_development.md, and §3 and §4 of readme_agent.md.
• I did not touch CHANGELOG.md, docs/LAUNCH.md or docs/system_connections_plan.md. There is no CHANGELOG entry because no behavior changed.

Assumptions and a follow-up

• I read the task's "Documentation voice" section as the existing ## 7. Documentation Voice, which differs only in capitalization.
• Follow-up: §7 says it covers prose in "README.md, docs/, and CHANGELOG.md". That list leaves out CONTRIBUTING.md, even though this task applies the rules to it. It also takes in the internal planning notes under docs/ that the task treats as out of scope. Fixing that line would change the spec's content, which this pass was told to leave alone, so I left it for a separate change.

Testing

The full suite (.venv/bin/python -m pytest -q) passed before and after the change: 393 tests.

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