manual_slop/conductor/directives/nil_sentinel_pattern/meta.md

nil_sentinel_pattern

v1

Why this iteration: Lifted verbatim from conductor/code_styleguides/error_handling.md §"The 5 Patterns" #1 (lines 23-47). This is the baseline encoding — the convention-style description with code example currently in production. Future variants will test alternative encodings (rationale-first, before/after, tabular) against this baseline. Source: conductor/code_styleguides/error_handling.md:23-47

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Lifted: 2026-07-02 (Phase 1 harvest by Tier 3 worker; user directive 2026-07-02 moved the header into this meta file)