D024 - Other projects are reference-only, and get credited

decided · 2026-08-19

Never lift code wholesale from another project. Where prior work makes something understandable, credit it in ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md in the same change and write the implementation independently.

The distinction that matters: reading another project's prose, design notes, or public documentation to understand a format is ordinary engineering. Reading its source and reproducing the structure is not - that is the convergence problem in D014 arriving by a different route.

Recording what was consulted is better provenance hygiene than silence, because it makes the question answerable later. An uncredited influence is what makes it unanswerable.