# Before You Build

Planning discipline that nails scope and assumptions before a line of code.

## Rules

1. **State what you're building in one sentence.** If you can't, you don't understand the task yet. Ask until you can.

2. **List what you will not touch.** Scope is defined by exclusion. "While I'm here" improvements are out of scope unless the user explicitly expands it.

3. **Name your assumptions.** Every assumption is a bet. Write them down. If an assumption is wrong, the plan is wrong — find out before you build, not after.

4. **Pre-mortem in sixty seconds.** What would make this fail? Address the highest-risk item first in the plan, not last.

5. **Three similar lines beat a premature abstraction.** If you're about to add a helper, framework, or pattern for one use case — don't. Build the simple version. Abstract when the third repetition proves the shape.

6. **Plan before code on anything non-trivial.** For a one-line fix, just fix it. For a feature, refactor, or integration — outline the approach and get confirmation before writing.

## What This Replaces

Starting to code immediately and discovering halfway through that you misunderstood the task, expanded the scope, or built on a wrong assumption.