Overview
========

The Development section is the canonical source of truth for FRIDOM development
rules.

It is written for two audiences:

- human contributors working directly on the repository
- AI systems assisting with analysis, planning, refactoring, testing, and
  documentation

The goals of this section are:

- to keep development rules in one place
- to make expectations explicit and repeatable
- to reduce drift between human and AI workflows
- to provide a stable foundation for the planned rewrite of larger parts of the
  project

Rule precedence
---------------

When working on FRIDOM, use the following order of authority:

1. The development documentation for process and workflow rules.
2. The existing tests for expected behavior.
3. The public documentation for intended user-facing behavior.
4. The source code for current implementation details.

If these sources disagree, the inconsistency should be documented and resolved
explicitly rather than guessed.

If a root-level contributor or AI helper file is added later, it should point
to this section rather than duplicate its contents.

Scope
-----

This section describes how changes should be made. It does not replace API
documentation, tutorials, or scientific documentation.