ACI-010: The Guidance File

Thesis

The guidance file is the one document the agent loads at every session start, so write it as an index: one line per rule, the detail in linked files, and only what every session needs. An always-loaded file has a load budget, and a rule past it is absent, not weak. Rules often start as a private note about an incident and reach the file by deliberate promotion; where a tool generates the file, only its fenced hand-authored block is yours.

Story

A guidance file used to be one hand-written document. At Intent it is now template output in three parts: a generated, tool-agnostic AGENTS.md (Intent@546dc3dab, 2026-04-24); a short CLAUDE.md overlay that carries rule ids rather than rule text; and a fenced block, between <!-- user:start --> and <!-- user:end -->, for the project's own lines (Intent@d3c147dfd, 2026-04-24). Intent's own file went from a 236-line hand-written guide to a 96-line overlay (Intent@66f679329, 2026-04-26). Regeneration copies the fenced block across: when a template was applied to Lamplight's file in August, the hand-authored catalogue inside the markers came through untouched (Lamplight@a01098d5b, 2026-08-24). So a commit that touches the file may be a regeneration nobody authored.