They Asked for My AI Rules. But I Could Not Just Hand Them Over.

A team lead announces that the team will start using AI-assisted development. Everyone nods. Nobody asks what that actually means on Monday morning.

Some times ago I was in that position. A project I was working on needed to start using AI-assisted development, and the team was new to it. Nobody had rules written down for an agent to follow. Nobody had skills defined for it to load. There was no shared idea of how this should work inside our specific repo. Someone had to go first. That someone was me.

The rules worked because I built them for one repo

I spent time curating a set of rules and skills for that project. Not generic ones. I shaped them tightly around how that repo was actually structured, its conventions, its layout, the things a new engineer usually has to learn by asking around. I wanted an agent working inside that codebase to already know what a human teammate would have picked up in the first two weeks.

I gave a demo. It landed well. Well enough that it got shared further across team, as something other teams could learn from.