Your agent's instructions are promises nobody checks. I counted.

I didn't set out to build a developer tool. For a long time now I've been working with AI on everything in my life — daily conversations about my daughters, planning projects, ideas for ones that don't exist yet. The goal was always the same: ease my life, get more done, and break the barrier between human and AI — stop treating it as a search box, start treating it as a partner. Somewhere along the way, the partnership got serious. The workspace where my projects live grew an instruction system for AI coding agents — the files everyone is writing now: AGENTS.md , CLAUDE.md , a skills directory, rules for how agents should plan, log, and verify their work. Then I asked an uncomfortable question: is any of it actually followed? Not "do the agents seem to follow it." Could anyone tell , from the repository alone, whether an instruction was followed? For most of my rules, the answer was no. My own audit found that the two checks my instructions said must run before every commit were invoked by nothing — no CI, no hook, no scheduled task. The rule had been enforced, for its entire life, by whoever remembered. Replaying my last 200 commits, the index-freshness rule alone would have failed on 29 of 61 eligible commits — roughly half. My instructions were not rules. They were hopes with formatting. So I wondered whether everyone else's are too. I wrote a tool and measured. What I measured, and the two honest limits that come before the numbers I analysed eight public agent-instruction collections — 1,332 instruction units, 17,611 individual instructions — each at a pinned commit SHA, with the raw per-repo JSON published alongside the tool. An instruction counts as CHECKABLE if a reviewer could tell from the repo whether it happened: it's a tick-box, or contains a runnable command, or names a concrete file artifact, or refers to an exit code, a diff, an assertion. Everything else is CLAIMABLE — the only evidence it happened is the agent saying so. Two limits, before any num