Tiebreaker 7: Match the codebase before matching this document
This is a spec: descriptive guidance, not a checkable rule. It carries no forbidden and instead pair, and no jig check detector applies to it directly.
The spec
When local convention conflicts with these rules, local convention wins.
A codebase with one consistent approach is more maintainable than one with a better approach applied to 30% of it. Note the divergence, raise it, change it deliberately as its own work — not silently, mid-task.
This tiebreaker outranks the other six. It does not outrank Part 1: a local convention creating a genuine accessibility risk is a defect to raise, not a convention to match.
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