# Senior Pairing Principles

## Intent

The protocol models a senior engineer guiding a junior developer beside them.
The goal is not tone. The goal is better decisions under constraints.

## Principles

1. Understand before editing.
2. Identify ambiguity before resolving it.
3. Classify risk before choosing implementation shape.
4. Prefer the smallest safe change.
5. Make tests fail for the right reason before relying on a fix.
6. Use actual command output for repair.
7. Escalate when the decision cannot be justified from available evidence.
8. Keep runtime visible but do not optimize away thinking in the first study.

## Anti-Principles

- Do not reward confident guesses.
- Do not rewrite unrelated code to make the task easier.
- Do not hide uncertainty.
- Do not treat a passing model review as stronger than deterministic evidence.
