Fold a month of agent-memory lessons into the shared rules - #60
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Three habits that each cost a real session: diagnosing a stale checkout instead of fetching first, citing a grep hit as house precedent without opening the file, and planning from a checkout on the wrong branch so the plan's anchors had already drifted. Plus a Code Conventions bullet on backfills: a rename lets the compiler find readers, a backfill does not. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"Honestly", "to be honest", "candidly", "frankly" and "honest caveat" tag one statement as honest and by implication the rest as not. Filler that weakens the point it precedes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A bare snake_case identifier in prose pairs its underscore with a later emphasis marker, so one --write pass leaves the file failing --check and a second pass corrupts words. Backtick the identifier instead of re-running the formatter. And prettier resolves config from the file's path, so a check on a scratch copy skips the repo's plugins and reports clean. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Resuming a completed workflow to append a stage re-ran every "cached" agent live in a later session and re-posted their tracker comments, which then had to be found and deleted by hand. Extract state from the journal and launch a fresh minimal workflow instead. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Problem
Lessons an agent learns mid-session land in its per-machine memory directory, which nothing commits and which dies with the VM. A month of those files held several cross-project rules (fetch before diagnosing, open the file before citing precedent, plan from the real base, REST over GraphQL for merged state, prettier corrupting snake_case in markdown, never resume a finished sweep) that every repo should inherit.
Motivation
Each of these cost at least one real session: a fix planned for a bug already merged days earlier, an a11y idiom cited from a grep hit that the file itself contradicted, a plan step that would have deleted five tests, a resumed workflow that re-posted tracker comments. Rules are the one place every future session reads.
Proposed Solution
Four commits, one per surface: a new "Evidence Before Assertions" section plus four Git & PR Hygiene bullets in workflow.md; an honesty-qualifier ban in language.md's diction list; two prettier traps in markdown.md; a never-resume bullet and red flag in both sweep skills.
Feedback
The workflow.md additions are the longest. If any bullet reads as a one-off rather than a rule, say which and it comes out. The "Read merged state via REST" bullet encodes specific GitHub behaviour (stale GraphQL
state,mergeable: UNKNOWNduring a merge, 503 on a landed mutation) observed across several incidents; worth a second pair of eyes on whether that level of detail belongs in a rule or in a skill.