Documentation, audit, or commit gate: three postures for CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md — and where each one stops

A reader asked, at the end of an unusually good comment on one of our CLAUDE.md posts:

"The bigger question for me is: should agent instruction files eventually be treated less like documentation and more like executable configuration—with schemas, validation, ownership, and automated linting?"

— @crdtcto

We've been running one answer to that for months, so rather than speculate: here are three postures you can take toward a CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md file, what each actually buys, and the exact line where the third one stops working.

A: it's documentation