u/Necessary_Abroad6632

Small thing, but it’s held up across enough sessions that I want to see if it’s just me.

My CLAUDE.md used to look like this:

## STRICT RULES — MUST FOLLOW
- We run tests before committing.
- This repo uses pnpm. Don't reach for npm.
- Prefer editing an existing file over creating a new one.

Rules got followed early in a session and quietly drifted by the time the context filled up. The usual fix everyone suggests is more caps, more NEVER/ALWAYS, more repetition. That didn’t do much for me.
Then I changed the heading to this:

## House rules
- We run tests before committing.
- This repo uses pnpm. Don't reach for npm.
- Prefer editing an existing file over creating a new one.

Same content. Better adherence, and it stuck further into long sessions.

My guess at why and this is a guess, not a claim:

“STRICT RULES MUST FOLLOW” is boilerplate the model has seen in a million half-broken prompts, so it carries very little signal. “House rules” reads as norms of a shared space you’re working in rather than a compliance block bolted on top. Switching from imperatives to “we/this repo” phrasing probably matters as much as the heading itself.
Caveats, because I know someone will ask: this is anecdotal. I didn’t run a controlled eval, I changed the phrasing at the same time as the heading, and I can’t rule out that I just got a good week.

So,has anyone else tested framing like this? Curious whether “house rules” / “team conventions” / “how we work here” beats “RULES” for you, or whether I’m pattern-matching on noise.

I recently realized some folks don’t know about /advisor in CC yet.

I tested it, and in my experience working with an advisor gives you more than just raising the effort level but only when you’re on an older model. Going through an advisor with Fable directly doesn’t add much, since it ends up advising itself. In that case, raising the effort level is the better move.

What i did is very simple, i went to my claude.md and added, and it’s working for me

```
## Communication style
Use ASD-STE-100 when you speak to the operator.
```

For those who dont know

```ASD-STE100 is an international standard for Simplified Technical English that uses clear writing rules and a controlled vocabulary to make technical documentation safe, simple, and easy to understand. It was created by the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD) to help non-native English speakers safely read aircraft maintenance manuals.```

Everyone’s .claude/skills/ folder is filling up with stuff pulled from marketplaces, gists, npx skills, random repos. On a team, those files land in the repo and nobody reviews them the way they’d review a dependency bump. A skill is just instructions your agent will follow and it changes silently.

So I wrote agpm (Apache-2.0). It does one thing:

1.	agpm sync writes two files: harness.json (what’s approved to exist) and harness.lock (a sha256 per file)

2.	The PR that changes harness.json is the approval. A human reviews the diff.

3.	agpm check in CI fails if anything on disk drifted from what was approved

It watches .claude/skills/, .agents/skills/, .claude/agents/*.md, and .claude/commands/*.md. It installs from a registry too, but installing is explicitly not approving : the PR is.

npx @baselane/agpm init

Repo: httpss://github.com/baselane-sh/agpm

Mostly curious whether other people are hitting this yet, or whether skill sprawl is still small enough that nobody cares. If you’ve got a different approach I’d like to hear it.