Topic archive
A practical guide for engineers who run coding agents on long sessions. Covers which memory and instruction files each major agent platform reads at startup, how to review them before a multi-step task, and how to run a quick smoke test that confirms the agent starts with the right context.
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.
A practical guide for teams writing coding agent tutorials that include runnable examples — how to keep secrets out of instruction files, workflow YAML, and shared prompts without breaking the examples that readers actually run.
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.