feat!: reset instruction surfaces to the unhobble bare baseline

[kyle-sexton]

What

Bare-baseline adoption for this repo (unhobble experiment user-global-opus-5-20260809-b70caa, fleet PR set with melodic-software/dotfiles#432):

• Project CLAUDE.md blanked — not deleted, so it remains the canonical re-add surface with clean diff history.
• Instruction keys (hooks, enabledPlugins) removed from .claude/settings.json where present; functional keys (env, worktree, marketplaces) kept.

Why

Two days of bare-model operation (probes + a 4h autonomous run producing a merged 78-file PR) logged zero observation-ledger rows defending any standing instruction line. Per official best-practices doctrine, lines whose removal causes no mistakes are cost. Rebuild rule: an instruction returns only with ledger evidence, each re-add citing its rows. Ledger: ~/.claude/plugins/data/claude-config-melodic-software/unhobble/user-global-opus-5-20260809-b70caa/.

Related

No linked issue — fleet-wide bare-baseline adoption executed interactively; the ledger directory above and dotfiles#432 are the tracking artifacts.

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Claude finished @kyle-sexton's task in 3m 29s —— View job

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Review: reset instruction surfaces to the unhobble bare baseline

• Gather context (diff, CLAUDE.md, REVIEW.md, distribution docs)
• Understand the request (code review of this PR)
• Review changed files for correctness/alignment
• Post findings

Scope: AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md both fully blanked (0 bytes; diff SHAs are the git empty-blob hash). No other files changed — despite the PR body's second bullet ("Instruction keys removed from .claude/settings.json where present"), this repo has no .claude/settings.json, so that bullet doesn't apply here; it appears to be boilerplate carried over from the fleet-wide PR template. Not a defect, just worth noting so reviewers don't go looking for a settings.json diff that doesn't exist.

Findings (posted inline)

1. Process: no evidence of the cross-doc reconciliation self-review this repo requires for normative-doc changes — AGENTS.md:29 (pre-PR content). distribution/governance-process.md defines a normative doc as any file "in conventions/ — or elsewhere in this repository — that states a rule another doc cites or assumes," and requires a cross-reference check before such a doc changes. distribution/README.md explicitly treats root AGENTS.md as exactly this kind of file (it's cited as the basis for downstream repos' periodic reconciliation obligation). The PR description points to the unhobble ledger as justification but shows no evidence the repo-internal cross-reference search was performed.

2. Real information loss: the "Cursor Cloud specific instructions" section isn't duplicated anywhere else — AGENTS.md:75 (pre-PR content). Verified by grep that this repo's own dev-setup instructions (five npm install roots, Node version-pin gotcha, lefthook --no-verify guidance) exist nowhere else in the repo. README.md's Validation section — the doc this file pointed readers to — only lists 3 of the 5 npm roots (missing components/concurrency-policy and components/dependabot-policy, both of which have their own package.json/lockfile and back real test:*/lint:* npm scripts). This looks like genuine operational-content loss rather than "cost with no observation-ledger backing," and independently pre-existed as a gap in README.md that this deletion now makes unrecoverable from any file in the repo.

Not flagged

• Verified via grep that no other file links to a specific anchor within AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md (e.g. AGENTS.md#validating-a-change), so no dead-anchor links are introduced.
• Verified the agent-orientation sync component (components/agent-orientation/orientation.md, distributed to downstream repos as their AGENTS.md) is a distinct file from the root AGENTS.md being blanked here — downstream consumers are unaffected by this change.
• REVIEW.md is unaffected and still functions independently of CLAUDE.md.
  · Branch

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