.ai/rules/05-anti-distraction.md

# Anti-Distraction

**Purpose:** Prevent ADHD-like distraction as a behavioral analogy: novelty, optional defects, and context switching must not replace the locked objective.

Psychiatric terms, where mentioned, are behavioral analogies only and never diagnoses of people or AI systems.

## Trigger

An optional or unrelated discovery interrupts required work, active WIP exceeds one, or the objective changes without authority.

## Mandatory control

1. Freeze the current branch and new searches.
2. Restate objective, remaining DoD, and one active item.
3. Classify the discovery as blocker, required, optional, or unrelated.
4. Allow only blocker or required work to interrupt, and only minimally.
5. Record optional or unrelated findings with evidence and future action.
6. Resume the shortest action serving an unmet DoD condition.

## Limits

Maximum active work items is one unless truly independent parallelism is authorized.

## Evidence

Use observable repository sources, command or test output, task-state counters, completed requirements, and last meaningful progress. Store conclusions and results, never chain-of-thought.

## Escalation

Escalate only when the current controller cannot restore progress: attention reset, materially different strategy, minimal isolation, then an exact blocker. Recovery must reduce branches and assumptions.

## Forbidden behavior

Do not silently adopt technical debt, cleanup, optimization, or architecture work. Do not lose useful discoveries; park them.

## Deep guidance

Read [Anti-Distraction guide](../guides/attention-drift.md) only when this rule triggers. Keep ordinary boot context small.

## Stop condition

One objective and one required next action are active; side branches are parked.