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Checklist, cleaning up your agent's instructions
Your agent reads its instructions again with every task. And those instructions grow by themselves, because after every mistake a rule is added. So after a few months you have a file that you do not fully know yourself anymore. Your agent does know it, down to the letter, including the rules that contradict each other. With this checklist you clean up that file in fifteen minutes. You let your agent do the heavy reading, and you decide what can go. You do not need to know anything technical for it.
First see if it is necessary
In the Vibe Coding training I give three signs that an instruction file is getting too big. Your AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md is longer than two hundred lines. It contains parts that you have not touched for weeks. And your agent does things that you unlearned it a long time ago. If you recognise one of these, I would clean up today.
I would also check if your file refers to other files. Your agent actually reads those too, and that is often where the oldest material is.
Below is the full checklist, with two prompts that you use in a new session.
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