Clean and true

Contract

Field	Bound contract
Trigger	Fires automatically after editing a durable artifact, or when the user says "clean and true", "run the hygiene pass", or "taste your own output".
Authority	Reversible local: writes only the just-changed durable artifact; rollback is restoring that artifact's prior on-disk content. No VCS, credential, paid, published, deployed, or remote mutation.
Side effect	May revise the just-changed local artifact through applicable hygiene passes only.
Done	Every applicable hygiene route ran or has a stated skip reason; findings are applied or explicitly deferred; no-op when nothing improves.

Inputs

• The just-changed durable artifact (path or content). Must be supplied.
• The set of hygiene passes available in the session. Optional; a pass absent from the session is skipped with a stated reason.

Procedure

1. Identify the just-changed durable artifact and bound scope to it; do not read or edit any other file. Done when: the artifact is identified and scope is bounded to it.

2. Classify what changed in the artifact and route to the hygiene pass the change earned:

   What changed	Hygiene route	Skip when
   Drifted prose that reads as sediment	Rewrite as a clean v0 from current truth	No sediment accumulated
   Padded prose whose every rule still binds	Debloat: cut what no rule depends on	Nothing padded to cut
   Anything a stranger must understand alone	Cold-read for standalone clarity	Short-lived or author-only
   A reality-grounded claim	Verify the claim both ways	No such claim present
   A truth duplicated across places	SSOTize: fold into one home, point the rest at it	A single home already holds it
   Voice, tells, or stack residue in prose	Strip tells and restore voice	Not prose, or not stale

   Done when: each change is classified and routed to its hygiene pass or marked with a skip reason.

3. Run each routed pass over the artifact. Skip any pass not available in the session with a stated reason. Done when: every routed pass is run or skipped with a reason.

4. Apply the findings to the artifact in this session. Done when: findings are applied to the artifact or explicitly deferred with a reason.

5. If a pass finds no genuine improvement, leave the artifact unchanged for that route. Done when: each route is confirmed as applied, deferred, or no-op.

Failure and recovery

• No applicable route: state that no hygiene route earned a run and leave the artifact unchanged; this is not an error.
• Routed pass unavailable in session: skip it with a stated reason and continue the remaining routes; the partial result is the set of routes that ran.
• Routed pass reports a finding that cannot be safely applied: defer it with a stated reason rather than widen scope or invent a fix.
• Non-mutation rule: never edit files outside the just-changed artifact; recovery is the prior on-disk content of that artifact.

Output

The revised artifact with findings applied, plus a per-route record stating whether each route ran, was skipped (with reason), or was deferred (with reason); if a pass finds no genuine improvement, it changes nothing.