💭 AIs aren’t good rule followers
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

!https://x.com/unclebobmartin/status/2044065822067282396

Date: April 14, 2026

External Link X (formerly Twitter) · x.com

I’ve gotta agree with bob on this one, the first thing I did to my biggest brownfield project I wanted to use agents on BEFORE they did work was a hardened pre-commit.yaml, ci, hardened type checking and linting. SECOND get rid of bad inconsistent patterns, let them replicate consistency, force them to pass checks. Agents will follow all of your markdown suggestions most of the time, enough for you to become complacent if you let it. They are goal seeking, if you put them to a task you thought was possible that is not given your constraints, they will try to find a way given enough tokens. I dont see this ever changing, its one thing that makes them great, it just needs to be kept in check.

NOTE
│ This post is a thought </thoughts/>. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts </tags/thoughts/>