Guidelines and Guardrails Belong in Git

One problem with AI is that it’s pretty stupid. I mean, sure, the current models are wildly useful. But out of the box, they overcomplicate, take undue shortcuts, and compound deficiencies to the moon. To get from default Claude or ChatGPT to a fast, affordable software loop – one that reliably zaps bugs, backlog items, and security vulnerabilities in your product in particular – it takes some real work. Increasingly, this is the work. So it’s past time you shared that work with your team. Guidelines and guardrails There are two main ways to get coding agents to behave consistently and correctly: steer them with guidelines, and redirect them with guardrails. Basically a union of “Please go do the good thing” with Error: You did the bad thing, try again. Sometimes, this means fighting models’ non-determinism with better non-determinism. We build and refine Markdown instructions: rules, docs, skills, and the like. Then at PR time, AI reviewers, classifiers, and human review workflows…