They Asked for My AI Rules. But I Could Not Just Hand Them Over.

A team lead announces that the team will start using AI-assisted development. Everyone nods. Nobody asks what that actually means on Monday morning. Some times ago I was in that position. A project I was working on needed to start using AI-assisted development, and the team was new to it. Nobody had rules written down for an agent to follow. Nobody had skills defined for it to load. There was no shared idea of how this should work inside our specific repo. Someone had to go first. That someone was me. The rules worked because I built them for one repo I spent time curating a set of rules and skills for that project. Not generic ones. I shaped them tightly around how that repo was actually structured, its conventions, its layout, the things a new engineer usually has to learn by asking around. I wanted an agent working inside that codebase to already know what a human teammate would have picked up in the first two weeks. I gave a demo. It landed well. Well enough that it got shared further across team, as something other teams could learn from. I gave the demo again. Same reaction. Then a few developers reached out for the actual rules and skills files. I said sure, and then I actually looked at what I would be handing them. The problem showed up the moment other people wanted in It was not copy-paste-able. The rules referenced folder names, module boundaries, and patterns specific to one repo. Handing them over as-is would have meant handing over advice that was wrong for their project, dressed up as a shortcut. So I told them to use it as a reference. Look at the structure, understand the reasoning, adapt it to your own repo. That is correct advice. I watched people nod at it and then quietly missing it. I was solving the wrong problem the whole time I had been thinking about this as a documentation problem. Write good rules, explain them well, let people copy the idea. What I actually had was a generation problem. The rules that worked were the ones rendered speci