CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Canonical contribution guidelines for the Patterson org live in patterson-corp/CONTRIBUTING.md. Read that first.

This repo keeps its own conventions

patterson (this repo) is governed by its own documentation chain, which takes precedence over generic org conventions where they'd otherwise conflict:

• AGENTS.md (CLAUDE.md is a symlink to it) — start here.
• .specify/memory/constitution.md — 7 binding principles, including the never-write list and the supply-chain gate.
• The specs/001-patterson-cli-v1/ spec tree — wins on any drift.

Before opening a PR:

bun install
bun run gate      # typecheck + test + lint — the full check before calling anything done

Commits follow Conventional Commits; commitlint and lefthook enforce this (bunx lefthook install once per clone). See REFERENCES.md for pinned upstream dependency versions.