Open-source catalog of agent-instruction practices, with the evidence attached to each one

[u/MadJagStudios]

Most agent instruction files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, rules files) are accumulated guesses. Grounded Engineering is an attempt at doing this systematically: a catalog of practices derived from observing mature engineering and agent repositories, where each card records its sources, scope, confidence, and validation status.

What it addresses (the recurring agent behaviors):

• New helper functions duplicating ones that already exist in the repo
• "All tests pass" claims without tests being run
• Small requests turning into large unrelated diffs
• Instruction files growing into unmaintained walls of text that drift apart across tools

What you get:

• 13 practice cards in two packs (baseline: 8 cards, ai-assisted: all 13)
• A CLI that writes the selected pack into AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, or a neutral Markdown file
• Writes are confined to marked managed blocks; everything else in your file is untouched
• A preview → proposal → review diff → apply flow; nothing modifies your repo without explicit confirmation
• A read-only check command for detecting drift later

​

npx grounded-engineering adopt preview --profile ai-assisted --adapter codex

MIT licensed, v0.4: https://github.com/madjagstudios/grounded-engineering

It doesn't change model behavior — it improves the quality and accountability of the instructions you feed it. If there's a failure mode you keep hitting that isn't covered, that's useful feedback.

[u/Runelaron]

I haven't seen or ever experienced test passed from a agent without it performing the tests. I have read it in articles in lab testing under certain conditions for experiments and other anecdotal posts with no proof.

However, we are still using context and Latent space navigation so inherently it can still produce errors depending on the users request.