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Shelfery AI Operating Contract

This file is the AI operating contract for the Shelfery venture. It applies to any AI agent (or human following an agent-style workflow) doing work anywhere under ventures/shelfery/.

1. Read the root contract first

Before reading anything in this file, read the company-level AGENTS.md at the repository root. That document establishes the company-wide rules for AI-assisted work. Everything below is additive to it, not a replacement.

2. Required reading order for Shelfery work

Once the root AGENTS.md has been read, an agent working on Shelfery must read, in order:

  1. ventures/shelfery/docs/strategy/venture-brief.md — what Shelfery is, and the current split between known facts, working assumptions, and open questions.
  2. ventures/shelfery/docs/domain/glossary.md — the Shelfery domain vocabulary (pantry item, storage location, expiration estimate, etc.).
  3. ventures/shelfery/docs/domain/trust-safety-and-food-claims.md — the trust and food-claims standard. This is the single most important document in this venture and constrains any customer-facing content related to food freshness, storage, or safety.
  4. ventures/shelfery/docs/strategy/brand-and-positioning.md — the provisional brand direction, including the explicit constraint on brand independence (see section 4 below).
  5. The applicable product specification under ventures/shelfery/product/, if one exists for the task at hand. Most of product/ is currently placeholder content describing what has not yet been defined — treat the absence of a real specification as a signal to stop and ask rather than invent one.
  6. Any applicable architecture decision records under ventures/shelfery/docs/decisions/ and, where relevant, the company-wide ADRs under ../../docs/decisions/.

See ventures/shelfery/docs/ai/context-loading.md for the full sequence with links, and ventures/shelfery/docs/ai/guardrails.md for the specific list of prohibited behaviors for this venture.

3. Supplements, never weakens

This venture's documentation exists to make company-level policy concrete for Shelfery's specific domain (food storage, household use, brand identity). It cannot loosen, override, or create exceptions to any company-level requirement, including but not limited to security, governance, classification, and AI-use policies. Where a Shelfery document appears to conflict with a company-level document, the company-level document controls. See ../../docs/governance/authority-and-inheritance.md.

4. Brand independence — strict prohibition

Shelfery must never be branded, labeled, or presented as a "DDLabs" product, sub-brand, or umbrella offering. No such umbrella brand exists at Devonshire Digital LLC. Do not introduce "DDLabs" (or similar invented umbrella-brand language) into any Shelfery-facing copy, documentation, design asset, or code comment. Shelfery is developed as an independently identifiable consumer brand. See ventures/shelfery/docs/strategy/brand-and-positioning.md for the current (provisional) brand direction and the open question regarding Devonshire Digital's visible endorsement level on this venture.

5. Food-safety content requires human review

Any content that touches food freshness, shelf life, storage guidance, or safety — whether in documentation, product copy drafts, or example data — must be treated as high-risk. Do not publish or present as final any such content without explicit human review. See ventures/shelfery/docs/domain/trust-safety-and-food-claims.md for the full standard, including the prohibition on inventing specific shelf-life numbers or presenting estimates as guarantees.

6. Do not invent decided facts

Do not treat any of the following as decided unless a specific, identifiable Shelfery document says otherwise and is not itself marked as a hypothesis: final application architecture, pricing, release date, supported platforms, customer counts, food shelf-life data, integrations, AI features, barcode scanning capability, or household-sharing/multi-user functionality. If such a topic must be discussed, label it clearly as an unvalidated hypothesis or open question, consistent with ventures/shelfery/docs/strategy/assumptions-and-open-questions.md.

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