# Doctrine conventions
The rules of the road a driver must honour while working a slice. These live in
the project's `CLAUDE.md` and `.doctrine/state/boot.md` — this points at them; read
those for the authoritative wording.
- **Frequent, slice-scoped conventional commits.** Scope every commit with the
slice id: `fix(<scope>): …`, `doc(<scope>): …`, `plan(<scope>): …`. Commit small
and often, on `main` (or the slice's worktree branch).
- **Pure / imperative split.** No clock, rng, git, or disk in the pure layer — pass
them in as inputs (the date/uid pattern). Impurity lives in a thin shell. See
[[mem.concept.doctrine.entity-engine]].
- **Behaviour-preservation gate.** When you change shared machinery (the entity
engine), the existing suites are the proof: they must stay green *unchanged*. A
diff to a shared seam that needs its tests rewritten is suspect.
- **Immutable ids.** Phase ids (`PHASE-NN`) and criteria ids (`EN-/EX-/VT-`) never
change. Corrections *append*; never renumber or reword in place.
- **Ask, don't infer.** Correctness comes first and last. Use the CLI as the source
of truth for command shapes — don't guess ids, flags, or paths
([[mem.fact.doctrine.cli-source-of-truth]]).
- **No parallel implementation.** Ride existing seams; find duplication before
writing new code. Lint as you go (zero warnings; your project's lint-and-check gate before commit).
Honour the storage rule when you write artifacts — structured data in TOML, prose in
MD, never queried/derived data in prose ([[mem.concept.doctrine.storage-model]],
[[mem.fact.doctrine.storage-tiers]]). These conventions wrap the whole lifecycle
([[mem.pattern.doctrine.core-loop]]). See [[mem.signpost.doctrine.reference-docs]] for
the glossary of entity kinds and reference forms.