process · guide-file

Keep a guide file of past failures

A versioned instruction file the agent reads before acting, where every line is a past failure converted into a permanent rule.

An AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md or equivalent: project name, exact build, test and lint commands, and a short list of rules and anti-patterns, each traceable to a specific past error. It is feedforward control — it shapes behaviour before execution — and it is organisational memory: corrections that would otherwise die with a conversation survive in the file. Guides must be pruned. Without maintenance they become contradictory and stale, and a rule that a sensor now enforces automatically should be deleted from the guide.

Requires: Someone has to convert each failure into a rule and, separately, prune rules that sensors have made redundant. A guide with two hundred undated lines is technical debt, not a harness.

Addresses: Following an unfamiliar procedure, Keeping its own context clean

Contexts: Coding agent, Autonomous agent

Does it work?

nothing measured0 supporting · 0 contesting sources

Efficacy claims — what this technique actually moves, under which conditions, and whether that has been contested.

No efficacy claim filed yet. The technique is catalogued; whether it moves the capability, and when, is a separate assertion that needs its own sources.

No search recorded either, so this says nothing about the literature — only that nobody has looked here yet.

Code

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Sources