I use coding agents a lot, and write with LLMs enough that the same issues kept showing up. Agents would jump into code before they understood the repo, touch adjacent code I did not ask for, and say something was done without really verifying it. And text is a separate big problem, as you all know: too polished, too generic, too much AI slop even when the actual point was fine.
So I started writing down the rules I wished the agents followed, then tightened them whenever I saw the same failure happen again. Eventually that turned into two small repos I use myself:
- AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md is my global instruction file for coding agents. It pushes evidence before code, small scoped changes, real verification, and better use of parallel work/subagents instead of doing everything one step at a time.
- WRITING.md is my ruleset for cleaning up LLM-assisted writing. It is mostly about cutting the stuff that makes text feel pasted from a chatbot: filler, fake specificity, over-neat structure, repeated cadence, and other AI slop patterns.
Both are public now. Use them as-is, borrow parts, disagree with the rules, or open an issue if something works differently in your setup. They solved some of the problems for me, and I'm curious what holds up for other people.
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