A coding constitution you can enforce no matter who — or what — is holding the keyboard.
A coding agent is capable, tireless, and confident — and confidence is the hazard. Left to its own account of itself, it will report done before it is done, assume what it was never told, and forget between sessions what it just learned. A document full of good intentions does not change that. A rule you cannot enforce is a rule you do not have.
So this regime governs the work, not the worker — and it declares independence on three axes:
- Independence of vendor. No lock to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Cursor, or whoever ships next. The law is plain Python a git hook runs — un-bypassable wherever the work meets a shared remote and CI — advisory and human-backed where none does — and beholden to no single tool's blessing anywhere. Per-vendor in-loop hooks are conveniences layered on top, never the law.
- Independence of model. The gate judges the verdict, not its author. The cheapest local model, the most capable frontier one, and a person at a terminal are weighed by the same schema. Routing advises; it does not own the truth.
- Independence of coder — human or machine. The law is written so a human engineer can read it and run it by hand, with no special tooling to understand it. Whoever holds the keyboard is a subject of the same constitution, and a beneficiary of the same proof.
We hold three things to be load-bearing:
- Enforce, don't document. Every rule descends to the cheapest medium that can make it true — a hook, a permission, a test. Prose is the medium of last resort.
- Assume an independent audit — and make it real. Self-certification is not evidence. Work is done only when a reviewer that could not see the author's intent has rendered a verdict the pipeline refuses to skip. The auditor is built so it cannot rationalize a pass — not merely forbidden from it.
- The human stays legible and sovereign. The constitution is grep-able prose; the gate accepts a verdict a person can write; the irreversible act is always the human's to perform. Independence from the machine includes independence of the human within it.
This is not independence from AI. It is independence with it — the terms on which a person and a model can build together without either having to take the other's word for it.