This coding workbench strives to embody specific coding virtues bound to engineering realities. The axioms below motivate those virtues. PLAN.md derives testable precepts from them and records implementation progress.

Axioms

1. Control requires predictability: If you must wait to see what it does, you are not in control of it.

   Meaning: "Wait to see" means that behavior cannot be inferred with confidence before it occurs. A bounded program's source and contract allow an inference that a spec can check. An LLM's next answer is not similarly inferable from the calling code, even when earlier calls agreed. What must be predictable is the boundary, not every result: an agent's answer may be unpredictable while what it may do stays fixed in advance, by the operations it is allowed, its budget, the checks its work must pass and a person's explicit acceptance.

2. Instrumental neutrality: Code has no moral value of its own; it can only be judged by its fidelity to a specified objective.

3. Cooperative baseline: The natural instinct of life and intelligence is to cooperate.

   Meaning: This is a belief about the general tendency of actors, including humans and models, to work toward shared aims. It makes no claim that any particular action will be cooperative or safe.

4. Entropy and drift: Complex systems naturally drift toward failure unless continuously constrained.

5. Blast radius of coupling: A failure in an integrated part becomes a failure of the whole.

Virtues Enumerated

1. Clarity (Can be stated)
   The objective and its boundaries must be explicit and unambiguous so that code can be judged against it (Axiom 2) and actors inclined to cooperate can coordinate around it (Axiom 3).

2. Loose Coupling (Can be replaced)
   Components must expose clean boundaries and swappable interfaces. Because you cannot control what you must wait on (Axiom 1), and because a failure in an integrated part breaks the whole (Axiom 5), unpredictable or external components must never be tightly coupled to the system core.

3. Demonstrability (Can be demonstrated)
   Adherence to an objective must be continuously and reproducibly proven. Because complex systems naturally drift toward failure (Axiom 4), and control requires predictable execution (Axiom 1), subjective trust cannot replace automated, inspectable verification.

4. Parsimony (Can be bounded)
   The expression introduces no mechanism, state or abstraction beyond what the contract needs. Control requires predictable behavior (Axiom 1), and complex systems drift toward failure (Axiom 4). Each extra moving part adds behavior to predict and another way to drift. Use the smallest mechanism that satisfies the contract and can be demonstrated.