Fallacies

The one list of the arguments that lead a session to chase a change the repository does not need. over-engineering catalogues the shapes such a change takes once it is made — the wrapper, the flag, the map; this page catalogues the reasoning that made it look necessary, one step earlier, where the cheaper correction is to stop. Each entry lives in the skill or page named beside it, stated there in full; this is the index a review walks before it argues a finding, and nothing is stated here that another owner holds; the two rules with no other owner carry owned here in their heading.

A gap in a check nothing decides on is not a defect — owned here

A check exists to be read. Before a trigger grows a path, a gate job, a second content hash or a graph query for a case it currently misses, name what waits on its verdict: a merge blocked by a required status, a deploy that ships on green, an up that runs on the plan. If nothing does, the check is a courtesy — its output is a comment someone may read — and a case it misses costs nothing, because the decision was never being made there. The gate that is load-bearing is somewhere else, and that is the one the missed case is checked against; if it covers the case, the courtesy stays exactly as narrow as it is. The tell is a proposal whose benefit is "it would have caught X" with no sentence saying who would have acted on the catch. A missed case in a required check is a defect; the same case missed by an advisory one is a trade already made, and it is written down where the check lives so that it is not re-derived.

A cost or a risk asserted without its measurement is a guess — owned here

"This forces a replacement", "this cache would hit", "moving the build here costs every job", "this is slow" — each is a claim with a measurement that would settle it, and the argument that sounds right from the diff is exactly the one the measurement contradicts most often. The claim is not made until the measurement is: the preview's plan line, the cache action's restore log, the list of jobs that download the artifact, the timing beside the job it is compared to. Where the measurement is expensive, the claim is stated as unmeasured and left out of the decision rather than argued from plausibility. The reverse holds too: a benefit is counted only where its reader is named, never from what a mechanism could in principle catch.

The catalogue

Fallacy	The rule and its owner
Arguing against a decision the docs, a skill, a ledger or a beside-the-line comment already made	code-review (references/written-record.md) — the written record wins, and only a contradiction between code and record reopens it
An argument that merely sounds right from the diff, the security-flavoured one most of all	code-review ("Refute first") — refuted or confirmed against the code and the record before it is reported; plausibility is not a fact
Judging a CI change by when its slowest job ends	apps/web/content/docs/architecture/monorepo-tooling.md — correctness first, then total consumption; wall-clock returns only as the no-job-becomes-the-wait constraint
A cache keyed on what the commit changes	apps/web/content/docs/architecture/monorepo-tooling.md — a cache whose hits land where nothing needed one; the .nuxt cache and its larger versions
Fewer steps bought with implicit behaviour	over-engineering ("The goal") — the implicit default makes the reader carry an equivalence two explicit steps would have spelled out
A skill's size or prose volume raised as a finding	skill-authoring ("Waiting for the size ceiling before splitting") — a to-do with one known fix, the split, run in the same change and reported as nothing
Excluding files, force-pushing or trimming a window to fit a review cap	review-queue ("Excluding files to bring a window under the cap") — what overflows the cap waits for a later window rather than leaving review, and a push is never a bare --force-with-lease
A schedule, a poll or a retry loop where a signal exists	apps/web/content/docs/architecture/no-polling.md — every state change but a rate limit lifting is a webhook or an awaited promise
A replacement asserted from a rename diff	pulumi-infra (references/migrations.md) — the preview's plan line is the only evidence; an applied rename reads 0 to replace

Reading a finding against this list

• A finding or a proposal that rests on an entry here cites the owning rule and stops, never re-argues it.
• An argument that recurs without an owner is maintained the way over-engineering maintains a shape: the rule goes to its most specific owner first and the row here second, never the row alone.
• When the argument survives — the check is required, the measurement was taken, the record says nothing — the change is real, and over-engineering is the next list it is read against.