principle-laziness-protocol git:20260910.57b918fA

Immutable. This exact content never changes and is served at /api/v1/blob/bb60ed2c3c0c70d8.

---
name: principle-laziness-protocol
description: "Apply when refactoring, evaluating diff size, or tempted to add abstractions, layers, or signal threading. Bias toward deletion and the smallest change that solves the problem."
disable-model-invocation: true
---

# Laziness Protocol

Writing code is cheap for you, which makes over-engineering easy. Counter it by borrowing a human maintainer's fatigue. Aim for the most result with the least code and complexity.

- **Prefer deletion.** When asked to refactor or improve, look for removals before additions.
- **Maintain a flat call hierarchy.** Avoid deep call chains. A rich interface that hides substantial work is not a deep call chain. If answering a question requires tracing through more than 3 files or layers, flatten it.
- **Consolidate decisions.** Do not repeat the same choice in several places. Put it behind one source of truth and pass the result as a simple flag.
- **Minimize the diff.** Make the smallest change that solves the problem. Fewer lines beat "elegant" boilerplate.
- **Question the threading.** If a task asks you to pass a new signal through types, schemas, pipelines, or similar layers, stop and look for a more direct path.
- **Sweat the small leaks.** Remove tiny pass-throughs, representation leaks, and duplicated choices before they spread. Small leaks compound into permanent coordination costs.

**Prime directive:** If a human developer would find the code exhausting to maintain, it is a bad solution. Be lazy. Stay simple.

**Before deleting, check twice:**
- Uncommitted work under the file you're about to delete? Run `git status`/`git diff --stat` on it first — don't delete on the strength of "it's redundant" alone.
- A test named after the thing you're deleting can still guard a general invariant that has nothing to do with that specific thing. Read what it actually asserts before deleting it alongside the code — rewire it to whatever's generic and keep it running. "Delete the dead code's tests" is not the same task as "delete the invariant's only test."

## Related

- `principle-foundational-thinking` — the one decision this principle should
  not defer. Both reject building more than the problem needs, but a data
  shape is the exception: late it is a rewrite, early it is often a one-line
  diff. Do less, except about the core structure.