Topic archive
A practical guide to auditing the scope, placement, and content of instruction files — AGENTS.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md, CLAUDE.md, and similar — so coding agents in your repo stay within intended boundaries.
Agent guides that lack source backing produce instructions agents cannot verify, leading to silent drift, broken CI, and unsafe automation decisions. This article maps the concrete failure modes, explains where guidance gaps originate in real instruction files and memory systems, and gives operators a practical workflow for diagnosing and hardening their own agent guides.
Long-running coding agents accumulate stale context, conflicting instructions, and forgotten constraints. This guide explains how to structure memory files, rotate context windows, and verify that your agent is operating from current instructions — not residue from a past session.
A practical guide to structuring AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, Copilot instructions, and git worktrees so coding agents receive accurate, scoped context for every task.
Coding agents read instruction files — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md, and memory files — to understand what tools, workflows, and conventions are available. When those files drift from the actual runtime environment, agents make confidently wrong decisions. This guide explains what prompt registry drift is, how it appears across popular agent runtimes, and how to detect and prevent it with CI-backed drift checks.