Zphil.LoadBearing 0.8.0

Zphil.LoadBearing

Zphil.LoadBearing is the LoadBearing spec contract: the fluent builder and reified rule model an architecture spec is written against. It is the one package a spec project references.

LoadBearing is one C# architecture spec with two render targets: deterministic enforcement (CLI/CI/agent hooks) and generated AI-agent context (a managed AGENTS.md block, scoped rules, MCP tools). Every rule carries a posture: Enforce for the law, Migrate for ratcheted debt with a grandfathered baseline, Quarantine for "here be dragons" code that must be contained rather than touched, and Caution for dragons that stay open to new callers: the same card and tripwire, no containment.

Writing a spec

A spec is a small class library with one class implementing IArchitectureSpec:

using Zphil.LoadBearing;

public sealed class ArchSpec : IArchitectureSpec
{
    public void Define(Arch arch)
    {
        Layer domain = arch.Layer("Domain", "MyApp.Domain.*");
        Layer web    = arch.Layer("Web",    "MyApp.Web.*");

        arch.Rule("layering/domain-independent")
            .Enforce(domain.MustNotReference(web))
            .Because("Domain is UI-agnostic; transaction boundaries live in services.")
            .Fix("Define an abstraction in Domain and implement it in Web.");
    }
}

Add the spec project to the target solution (dotnet sln add arch/MyApp.ArchSpec/MyApp.ArchSpec.csproj) and the tooling discovers it by convention: the unique solution project that references this package. The spec project itself is excluded from the checked universe, along with anything only it pulls in: a library the spec references that the solution does not declare.

The four LoadBearing packages ship one version in lockstep: reference the version your installed loadbearing tool prints from loadbearing --version.

Pick the spec project's target framework by one rule: it must be able to reference the product projects it will typeof(). This package is netstandard2.0 with zero dependencies, so a spec project can target anything from net48 up.

This package is the contract only

Nothing in it checks or renders anything. That is done by:

• Zphil.LoadBearing.Cli, the loadbearing global tool: check, render, explain, status, graph, baseline, and the MCP server (loadbearing mcp).
• Zphil.LoadBearing.Xunit, the adapter that runs every rule in the spec as an individually named xUnit test.

Baseline files are theirs too. This package describes a captured baseline, and the two runners above are what read one off disk and hand it to the check.

Documentation

• Repository and full README

License

MIT