Articles

Measured findings on context engineering, loop engineering, and the instruction files that steer AI coding agents: CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, system prompts, and the checks around them.

Research

The State of AI Instruction Quality (30k repo analysis)

28,721 repositories. 165,063 instruction files. 3.3 million instructions. What the corpus shows.

Gábor Mészáros · April 21, 2026 · 9 min read

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Research

The Undiagnosed Input Problem

The ecosystem inspects outputs. The input side has no equivalent diagnostic layer.

Gábor Mészáros · April 8, 2026 · 8 min read

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Research

Do NOT Think of a Pink Elephant

Ordering effects in LLM instruction-following — directive first, restriction last.

Gábor Mészáros · March 31, 2026 · 5 min read

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Research

Instruction Best Practices: Precision Beats Clarity

Formatting is the signal. Precision is the target.

Gábor Mészáros · March 24, 2026 · 5 min read

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Field Notes

CLAUDE.md Best Practices: 7 Formatting Rules for the Machine

Don't just write more instructions. Format the ones you have.

Gábor Mészáros · March 3, 2026 · 8 min read

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Field Notes

Why Bootstrap Should Be the First Command in Every Agent Session

Don't start a session. Bootstrap it.

Gábor Mészáros · February 24, 2026 · 6 min read

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Field Notes

CLAUDE.md Best Practices: Mermaid for Workflows

Don't describe the path. Draw the map.

Gábor Mészáros · February 17, 2026 · 6 min read

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Field Notes

CLAUDE.md Best Practices: The backbone.yml Pattern

Don't drop your agent in the dark. Give it a map.

Gábor Mészáros · February 10, 2026 · 5 min read

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Field Notes

CLAUDE.md Best Practices: From Basic to Adaptive

A capability ladder for instruction files — L0 through L6.

Gábor Mészáros · January 27, 2026 · 7 min read

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