ouroboros/docs/DEVELOPMENT.md

DEVELOPMENT.md — Development Principles & Module Guide

This is Ouroboros's engineering handbook: imperative rules for changing the body, grouped by change class, each naming the surface that enforces it — a test, a gate, a CI lane — or stating honestly that none does. The first chapter fixes this book's authority beside the constitution, the architecture map, the design semantics and the reviewer checklists; the rest are the rules themselves, from naming and size discipline through the governance-artifact contract, the commit protocol, the per-change-class rules, and the build and CI topology. Read the chapter for the class of change in hand: this book is not a changelog, and a change replaces the description of the node it touched.

Chapters

• Role and authority
• Naming and boundaries
• Module Size & Complexity
• Core Governance Artifacts
• Review & Commit Protocol
• Rules by change class
• Managed Update Rule
• Mutation Attribution Rule
• Process Custody Rule
• Platform Abstraction Rule
• Design System
• MCP Client Integration
• Gateway Boundary Pattern
• Build & CI