More rules should mean better output. That's the intuition. I spent weeks building a comprehensive CLAUDE.md — 200 lines covering naming conventions, security rules, error handling, architectural patterns, import ordering, type safety requirements, and more. I was proud of it. I'd thought through every scenario. Then I scored the output. 79.0 / 100. My carefully crafted documentation was actively
Have you ever looked at code you wrote six months ago and thought: "Who wrote this monster?"? Relax, it happens to all of us. In software engineering, writing code that a machine understands is the easy part. The real challenge is writing code that other humans (including your future self) can understand, maintain, and scale. This is exactly where Software Design Principles come into play. In this
In April 2026, Google Labs released a spec called DESIGN.md. It's a design system specification readable by AI agents, packaged with a CLI validator: npx @google/design.md lint. With DESIGN.md in the picture, we now have three different file types for instructing AI agents. AGENTS.md has been spreading as an industry standard since 2025 (jointly developed by OpenAI, Google, Sourcegraph, Cursor, an
Part 1 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract — what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. SWE-CI tested 18 AI models across 71 consecutive commits. Most broke something on commit 47 they'd already broken on commit 1. That's not an intelligence problem. That's a learning system that isn't learning. A paper made me uncomfortable this month. Not because of what it found about