Don't rely on instructions, use Agent Hooks to enforce guardrails

This post is for developers who use AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md to provide guardrails for agent-generated code, but find that the agent sometimes ignores rules. if you want a deterministic check that will work 100% of the time, read on about agent hooks. First, a clarification. Agent Hooks are different than git hooks which many developers are familiar with. The most popular Git hook might be the pre-commit hook which is called before you try to commit everything and is a popular place to do perhaps a git pull or some code formatting (e.g., prettier or mix format) to ensure your code is formatted as per the language's standards. The limitation of a pre-commit hook is that it gets executed well after you have generated the code and just before you think you're done (i.e., commit time). Agent hooks are invoked when the agent (e.g., Claude Code) is doing work and allows developers to interject themselves into the agent's workflow, rather than after the work is done (e.g., code review). Here's…