RUL-014 — A ruling that exists only in prose is incomplete work

Ruling

Every ruling must resolve to a mechanism: a hook, a gate, a banned-deps entry, a constitutional article, or an explicit enforcement: none (judgment) mark — never left as prose alone. New user ruling → same session: (1) add the wiki page, (2) add/extend a mechanical gate or record the judgment mark, (3) log via session choice.

Evidence

• plans/workflow-improvements-plan.md Phase 0 problem statement: the 645-prompt Kimi history shows no-xdist, no-mocks, Incus-not-Docker, and .env-only each re-issued >10 times before mechanical enforcement existed — prose alone does not stick.
• Step 0.3's registration protocol (this same plan) states the rule directly: "A ruling that exists only in prose is incomplete work."

Enforcement

• gate scripts/rulings_lint.py enforcement:

Verification

scripts/rulings_lint.py is the mechanism THIS ruling describes — it reads every rulings/RUL-*.md page's enforcement: directives and fails (exit 1) if any declared hook/gate/banned-deps/constitution reference does not actually exist, so a ruling can no longer silently regress to prose-only.