# Operator Economy of Effort — Why this is canon

*Lifted from `AGENTS.md` § OPERATOR ECONOMY OF EFFORT § Why this is canon,
not preference under GHI #327. The operative claims and anti-patterns
remain canonical in `AGENTS.md`; this page holds the justification narrative.*

## Why the design-dialogue mode is canon

The draft → review → decide → attest interaction shape produces witnessed,
attestable, replayable governance work without consuming the operator's
bandwidth as the bottleneck.

Every other mode either shifts the typing burden onto the operator or
produces output the operator has to re-author into the canonical shape
after the fact:

- **Operator drafts, agent reviews.** The substantive labor lands on the
  human; the agent's review pass is the cheap part. The economy is
  inverted.
- **Bundled clarifying-question intake.** The operator answers `n` questions
  in one round; the agent's next draft incorporates them but the operator's
  typing budget has already been spent on raw prose.
- **Open-ended brainstorming without decision-shaping.** The agent
  generates options without forcing-functions or bounded answer space; the
  operator must impose the structure after the fact.

Both inverted modes are forms of vibing through the interaction layer —
the agent appears active while pushing the substantive labor onto the
human or producing artifacts that need to be redone.

## Relationship to the rest of the contract

The Operator Economy claims are downstream of the anti-vibing mantra and
upstream of the Attestation discipline:

- **Upstream (anti-vibing):** *"every option is framed by which choice
  leaves the smallest surface for vibing to leak through"* — the design-
  dialogue mode is the interaction-layer instantiation of that frame
- **Downstream (attestation):** the operator's verbatim phrasing
  preservation rule (operative claim 3) is the same rule as the
  attestation-text pattern (`<user verbatim words> — <session-grounded
  enrichment>`). One originates the operator's words; the other preserves
  them through to the receipt.

## When the design-dialogue mode does not apply

The mode binds for **design, decision, doctrine authoring, ADR ceremony,
and OBPI walkthrough.** It does not bind for routine code edits where the
operator's intent is already encoded in the brief, the failing test, or the
literal user message ("fix X by doing Y"). In those cases the agent
executes against the existing intent surface; the design-dialogue mode would
be ceremony overhead.

## Origin

GHI #327 — instructions-files-diet pass that lifted this rationale out of
`AGENTS.md` to economize per-turn context weight while preserving the
operative claims at canonical home.
