Prefer SOTA

The rule. The state of the art is the default bar for every design, tooling, or practice decision: where a choice has a credible SOTA answer, that answer is the presumptive pick. But "it is SOTA" is never on its own sufficient warrant to adopt. Before adoption, SOTA is challenged for fit against this repo's stated preferences by an adversarial reviewer whose sole job is to find where the generic best practice collides with a deliberate local constraint. Only the SOTA that survives that challenge — or is re-selected in light of it — is adopted. When the best option is not obvious, the sequence is fixed and ordered: adversarial fit-challenge first, then a SOTA verdict that already accounts for the challenge, then the pick.

Why. abcd is an opinionated configuration layer for development — its value is the set of considered defaults it holds and propagates, not raw novelty. SOTA is the right starting bar because it encodes the field's accumulated learning cheaply; refusing it reinvents. But adopting SOTA unfiltered is the opposite failure: a generic best practice can directly violate a load-bearing local choice (host-delegated LLM work, minimal dependencies, host-agnostic prose, a single source of truth). Running the fit-challenge before the verdict is what stops "it's SOTA" from laundering a preference violation — the adversary supplies the repo's own objections as an input to the recommendation, so the verdict is fit-aware rather than fit-blind. This is the opinion in "opinionated configuration": abcd does not chase novelty, and it does not ossify — it takes the field's best and earns each adoption against what the repo already believes.

Bounds.

• Binds on genuine forks — a design, tooling, or practice decision where the best option is not obvious. Trivial or fully-specified choices with a conventional default state the assumption in one line and proceed; they do not summon the process.
• The adversary challenges fit, not SOTA's abstract correctness: its output is the enumerated places generic SOTA would trample a named local preference, plus the surviving-fit hypothesis. The SOTA verdict then ranks options already filtered through that challenge; it never reports raw SOTA as the answer.
• A local preference can itself be wrong. When the challenge exposes a constraint that survives only by inertia, the response is to revisit it deliberately — an ADR under ../decisions — never to silently keep it and never to silently break it.
• Composes with evaluator-outside-the-loop (the challenger is independent of whoever proposes the option) and verifier-selects-gates-decide: the SOTA verdict is a proposal; the human's adoption is the gate.

Remedies proposed for an issue or chosen in an autonomous run. Every remedy cites its grounds, whoever writes it and whether or not a human is in the loop: the remedy a capture proposes for an issue, and the pick a run with no human in the loop makes (a fix for a captured issue, or one option over another when a finding admits several). The grounds sit in the record that carries the remedy (the issue's remedy line, the resolve note's grounds, the commit message). Where the fix depends on outside practice (an interface convention, a security posture, a tool's documented behaviour), the grounds include a primary-source state-of-the-art check: the standard, the vendor's own documentation or the practitioner research, named so a reader can open it. Where the fix is purely internal, the grounds say so. A remedy suggested or picked without that check can repeat a known-bad approach, and a record that carries no grounds leaves nobody able to tell why the remedy beat the alternatives. The check is the short form of this principle, not the full adversary pass: it binds every remedy proposed or chosen, while the fit-challenge above binds the genuine forks.

Scope. This is a propagated default, not a repo-local habit — it holds for every abcd-managed repo, as one of the opinionated conventions abcd installs. Its home in a managed repo is the marked working-conventions section abcd writes into that repo's AGENTS.md; abcd's own record carries the normative statement here.

Live instance. Choosing how to wire the iss-35 semantic cross-check as a release gate: an adversarial reviewer challenged generic release-engineering SOTA (policy-as-code, release-automation tooling, an LLM judge in CI, an executable gate target) against this repo's host-delegated-LLM, minimal-dependency, single-source-of-truth, host-agnostic preferences, and only the fit-surviving form was taken to a SOTA verdict for adoption.

Promotion. MVP: a documented decision protocol — this principle, plus the standing model-routing note naming which agents fill the challenger and researcher roles. Tool: an abcd verb that scaffolds the adversary → SOTA-verdict pass for a decision and records the challenge and verdict as a dated research note beside the ADR it informs, so the fit-filter is a cheap repeatable step rather than a remembered discipline. The managed-repo propagation path (the AGENTS.md conventions section abcd installs) is itself the tool rung for reach: the principle ships as an abcd default rather than being re-derived per repo.