The seven non-negotiable rules

The root AGENTS.md lists seven non-negotiable rules under "Non-negotiable rules (the floor)". Here they are in order, each with the one thing you must remember and the standard that owns the detail.

1. English only

All code, comments, commits, docs, identifiers, and PR text are in English. No other natural language anywhere. This keeps every diff readable by every contributor and every auditor, regardless of who or what wrote it.

2. Conventional Commits 1.0.0

Every commit message is <type>[scope][!]: <desc>. The type carries meaning: feat and fix drive versioning, ! or a BREAKING CHANGE: footer marks a break. The rule and its full type list live in commits-versioning.

3. Signed commits

Commits are SSH-signed and show as Verified. Unsigned commits are rejected, not warned about. Never disable signing to get a commit through.

4. Docs-as-code

If code changes, docs change. A change that touches code but leaves docs/, any *.md, or the CHANGELOG untouched is incomplete. The governing standard is documentation.

5. Least privilege

Default deny. Request only the capabilities a task actually needs, and never broaden a grant to make a step easier. Access is through teams and roles, not per-person grants, with separation of duties between author, approver, and deployer. See authorization.

6. Autonomy within the rails is the default

Correctness is enforced by construction, so an agent acts unattended while it stays inside its least-privilege grant, its typed and schema-validated inputs and outputs hold, policy-as-code passes, its effects are reversible or canaried under a blast-radius cap, and the eval/red-team gate is green. Every autonomous action is still traced as WORM evidence. The owning doctrine is autonomy-and-oversight.

7. The human gate is an exception handler, not a routine checkpoint

A human is summoned on an exception, not over every correct action: (1) an automated check fails; (2) confidence is low or the case is novel; (3) drift, an anomaly, or a policy violation is detected; or (4) an action in the minimal always-human set - at Day 0 the apply / merge / release / secret-rotation / org-settings ceiling, plus irreversible-catastrophic actions such as root-CA ceremonies, billing, mass data deletion, external publication, and sovereignty changes.