Artifact: Instruction-File Precedence Conflict

A repo-level and a user-level instruction file declaring one conflicting rule, checked against Claude Code's documented memory-file loading behavior -- exercises co-06.

# CLAUDE.md (repo-level, this project's root)
 
Commit messages: Conventional Commits, imperative mood, no trailing period.

# ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md (user-level, global to every repo)
 
Commit messages: always end with a period, for consistency with my personal notes.

The two files state a directly conflicting rule about trailing periods on commit messages. Claude Code's own documentation states that every discovered instruction file is concatenated into context, not overriding each other, loaded broadest-scope first: managed policy, then the user's ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, then the project's CLAUDE.md (or its AGENTS.md import), then any local override file -- "so a project instruction appears in context after a user instruction." That load order is a context-assembly order, not a conflict-resolution rule: the documentation is explicit that when two files truly disagree, "Claude may pick one arbitrarily." So the honest, verified answer for this pair of files is that neither rule is guaranteed to win -- a commit message from this repo could plausibly land either with or without the trailing period, and that is the documented behavior, not a gap in the documentation.

Verify: the artifact states the actual documented behavior (concatenation into context, in a broadest-to-narrowest load order, project loaded after user) and cites the specific documented disclaimer it relies on ("if two rules contradict each other, Claude may pick one arbitrarily") -- satisfying ex-08's rule of verifying what the agent does and citing the documented precedence order, which for a genuine contradiction is explicitly non-deterministic rather than a fixed override.