/principle-boundary-discipline

name: principle-boundary-discipline
description: "Apply when wiring validation, error handling, or framework adapters. Concentrate guards at system boundaries (CLI, config, network, external APIs); trust internal types and keep business logic in pure functions."
disable-model-invocation: true

Boundary Discipline

Place validation, type narrowing, and error handling at system boundaries. Trust internal code unconditionally. Business logic lives in pure functions; the shell is thin and mechanical.

**Why:** Scattered validation is noisy, redundant, and gives a false sense of safety. Validate data once at the boundary. Keep logic out of framework wiring so it can be tested without the framework.

**The pattern:**

• **At boundaries** (CLI args, config files, external APIs, network protocols): validate, return errors, handle defensively.
• **Inside the system:** typed data, error propagation, no re-validation. Trust the types.
• **Across the boundary.** Expose domain concepts, not the boundary's private representation. Keep general-purpose mechanism inside and special-purpose policy at the edge.

**Applications:**

Validation and error handling:

• Validate config at parse time (the boundary), not inside business logic
• Parse raw data into domain types at the boundary
• Do not re-export transport, storage, framework, or wire types through the public surface
• No redundant nil checks deep in call chains if the boundary already validated

Code organization:

• Business logic in pure functions with no framework dependencies
• Parse functions: pure transforms from raw bytes to typed state
• Prompt construction: structured state in, string out
• Scoring and assessment: pure transforms from state to results

**The tests:**

• "Is this data crossing a system boundary right now?" If not, validation is redundant.
• "Can this be a pure function that the shell just calls?" If yes, extract it.