State and enforce critical behavioral contracts explicitly

When implementing or reviewing changes, explicitly state non-negotiable behavioral invariants—especially for release safety, parsing, validation, event ordering, identity, and compatibility—and enforce them at the earliest relevant boundary with focused regression tests. Preserve established behavior rather than silently normalizing or broadening semantics. Treat user-stated constraints as authoritative: for example, option-looking tokens must not become workspace names; prerelease relaxation applies only to the running version, never configured minVersion; the CI poller adds ci-ready; and unused-variable rules must not be mischaracterized. Require focused and full verification, distinguish new failures from known baseline warnings, and audit final diffs, documentation, workflows, and tests against the contract.