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bare-rule

A house-style rule, off until a decisions table turns it on: it reports "rule" in agent instructions with no mechanism named.

What it catches

"rule" in agent instructions with no mechanism named.

Dimension

conventions: a house or genre convention is broken. A finding is counted on the dimension of its rule, the cost it names to the reader.

Why

House style: in this repository's skills a rule is only what magus enforces, and the rest is an instruction.

Default decision

The code is PRF7003. The decision depends on the kind of text judged:

Kind Default
agent-brief off
agent-compact off

House style ships off: the rule encodes one repository's conventions, not a rule of plain writing. A repository turns it on in its decisions table.

Changing it

A decisions table sets this rule to deny, advise or off, for everything judged or for the files a glob matches. Proofread reads the table from the file its -decisions flag names:

{
  "rules": {"bare-rule": "deny"},
  "paths": {"blog/**": {"bare-rule": "off"}}
}

rules applies to every file. A glob in paths applies to the files it matches, and the last match wins. A rule set to off never reports.

Seeing it

A finding names the rule, its code and the decision that applies, and links here:

{"rule": "bare-rule", "code": "PRF7003", "decision": "deny", "url": "https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/reference/proofread/bare-rule/"}

proofread rules prints this entry with every other rule's.

See also

proofreadrulesbare-ruleoff
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Glossary

CI

An ordinary target you compose yourself with ctx.needs; magus does not hardcode its stages. It is the anchor magus affected ci keys off, and ci strips the rw charm. CI in full.

Agent

A model working through an agent host such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or OpenCode. magus treats an agent as one more caller of its CLI, MCP tools and console, held to the same checks as a person. Agent in full.

Skill

A packaged set of instructions an agent host loads when a task matches its description: a directory holding a SKILL.md. magus ships its magus-* skills in the binary and writes them with magus agent install. Skill in full.

Conventions

This page uses none of the site's convention markers. The full set is on the conventions page.