Written project rules only help when the agent has loaded them and the work can be checked against them. These articles cover why agents skip instructions, how to keep one set of rules across tools and monorepo packages, how to hold a small fix to its declared scope, and how to confirm the rules were loaded before any file changed.
5 articles
An agent saying it read CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md is not evidence. Use the records each tool keeps, gate edits on a load record with a pre-edit hook, and list the edit paths that hook cannot see.
Declare the scope before the agent starts, match the control level to the size of the change, and compare the diff with the declared scope before you keep it, because passing tests do not prove a patch stayed small.
Scope each package's conventions to that package, start the agent where your tool expects, write a precedence rule for cross-package changes, and check which rule files loaded for each changed file.
Put the project's instructions in one AGENTS.md, keep each tool's own file thin, and record separately what each tool enforces, because hooks and permissions do not travel with the instructions.
An agent that breaks your written rules is either missing them from context or skipping them after they loaded. Check which, make the rule verifiable, and move the parts a script can decide into checks you can inspect.
