Software
Rules and hooks
Corrections graduate into rules files and hooks the machine cannot ignore.
Requires The Harness I
The fourth law says a repeated instruction is a missing rule; Claude Code gives the rule three places to live, in ascending strength. CLAUDE.md and rules files are read every session: house law, written once. Path-scoped rules load only in their territory, so the machine's context carries what applies and nothing else. And hooks are rules with teeth: code that runs on every action and blocks the forbidden ones outright, whatever the model thinks.
Choose the strength to match the failure. A style preference is a rules line. A workflow convention is a rules file with the incident that earned it. A thing that must never happen, an unauthorized commit, a secret in a command, gets a hook, because the difference between discouraged and impossible is the whole point of the fourth law's graduation.
How to practice it
The rulebook is part of the repo.
Rules are code: reviewed, versioned, incident-linked. A correction that matters ends its day as a diff to the rules tree.
Scope rules to their territory.
App-specific law loads when files in that app are touched. Global context is a budget; spend it on what is global.
Hooks for the absolute.
Anything with real blast radius is enforced by code that runs regardless of the model's judgment. Prompts request; hooks refuse.
Write the why into the rule.
Rules that carry their incident survive review, teach the next reader, and don't get relitigated by a confident machine.
Deep scripture: Codeuteronomy V — A repeated instruction is a missing constraint