manual_slop/conductor/directives/rag_six_rules/v1.md

rag_six_rules — v1

Why this iteration: Lifted verbatim from conductor/code_styleguides/rag_integration_discipline.md §"0. The 6 rules (the one-glance table)" (lines 11-20). This is the baseline encoding — the one-glance-table-with-why-column style currently in production. Future variants will test alternative encodings (rule-only, rationale-first) against this baseline.

Source: conductor/code_styleguides/rag_integration_discipline.md:11-20

---

0. The 6 rules (the one-glance table)

#	Rule	Why
1	RAG is opt-in. Default-off in new projects	Most features don't need it; the cost of unnecessary RAG is the embedding-provider round trip + the storage cost
2	RAG complements; it never replaces	Curation / Discussion / Knowledge are the durable, user-editable dimensions; RAG is the fuzzy, semantic search
3	RAG results display with provenance	The user needs to know which file and which chunk produced the result
4	RAG never mutates state	No auto-injection of RAG results into disc_entries; no auto-update of FileItem; no auto-write to disk
5	RAG integration is feature-gated	A feature must explicitly request RAG in its scope; RAG is not the default for "give me context"
6	RAG failure is graceful	A failed search returns Result.empty or an empty list; never crashes the request