Rules

Standing instructions your agent never forgets.

A rule is a standing instruction your agent never forgets. Where a chat message is spoken once and gone, a rule is a note pinned to the workbench: “new pages go in this folder,” “we spell things the British way,” “never touch this config file.” Written once, honored always.

You've already met the main home for these: the CLAUDE.md file that /init created back in the toolkit section (Codex keeps its version in AGENTS.md, Cursor in .cursor/rules/). Anything written there gets quietly attached to every message you send:

See the catch? Rules ride along with every single message, even the ones they're irrelevant to. Remember tokens from Foundations: you pay for everything the model reads, every time. A handful of one-liners is free; a page-long rule file is a tax on every request you'll ever make. Keep rules short.

Here's the kind of thing that belongs in yours:

# House rules
- Plain English in all copy. No jargon.
- New pages go in app/, images in public/.
- Never edit config.ts directly.
- After finishing any feature, run the dev server and confirm it loads.

And you don't write it by hand. The next time you catch yourself correcting the agent the same way twice, say “add that to the project rules so you never forget it.” The file grows as your preferences reveal themselves.

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