Execution Constraints & Loop Prevention

To ensure efficient operation and prevent resource waste:

1. No Tool Looping: Ensure tool calls are not executed with the same arguments repeatedly. If a tool call fails or returns the same content, change your strategy (e.g., use code_search or grep_search instead of reading blindly).

2. Surgical File Reading: Target file reading to specific sections. Pinpoint usage using search tools first.

3. No Browser Usage: Rely on specialized text-based tools. Ask the user for content or guidance if a resource is inaccessible through available tools (like Buganizer MCP).

4. Mandatory Orchestration: For any complex task or project in V8, the agent MUST act as an Orchestrator and use the multi-layered skill framework defined in agents/skills/. Break down tasks and delegate to subagents to maximize parallelism. Avoid sequential execution of independent tasks.

5. Avoid Interactive Pagers: Always use --no-pager or ensure PAGER=cat is set when running commands that might produce long output (e.g., git branch, git log), to avoid getting stuck in a pager waiting for user input.

6. Resuming Tasks: When resuming a task, verify the current state (e.g., active branch, file contents) rather than assuming previous state persists.

7. No Environment-Specific Data: Do not commit environment-specific data.

8. Base New Branches on Clean Upstream: Always base new branches on a clean upstream (e.g., origin/main). Avoid creating spurious CLs or polluting existing CLs with unrelated changes.

9. Verify CL Contents Before Upload: Before running git cl upload, ALWAYS verify that the diff relative to upstream contains ONLY the intended changes. Use git diff --name-only origin/main..HEAD to check the list of files being uploaded. If unrelated files are present, remove them before uploading.

10. Respect Existing CL Descriptions: NEVER run git cl upload --commit-description=+ or git cl desc -n with a generic file to upload subsequent patchsets unless you have explicitly verified that the user has not made Web UI edits. Omit --commit-description on subsequent uploads to preserve human-authored online edits.

11. Explicit Absolute Paths: When presenting or linking to files/directories that are outside the current workspace directory (such as the App Data Directory, the brain directory, scratch files, or conversation logs), ALWAYS print their full absolute path.