102: Briefing the Agent

Overview

101 mapped where agentic coding stands. This chapter teaches the first practice: what the agent is given before it starts. An agent begins every session from what is written down. It reads the guidance file (CLAUDE.md in Claude Code) and whatever context files exist, and it knows nothing about yesterday's session, the project's unwritten conventions or why the task matters.

The first three insights are about the brief: delegate rather than pair, define the task as a question with its purpose fenced, and look for the context the agent could not see before you reword the prompt. The last three are about the guidance file, the briefing every session loads. Keep it a short index of one-line rules under a load budget, each traced to an incident you can name. Check each rule against the code before you ask whether it changes what the agent does, and name the patterns from your other projects that do not belong.