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As AI coding agents become central to software development, engineering teams need to adapt their coding guidelines to work for both humans and AI. Unlike onboarding a junior developer, agents require explicit, unambiguous instructions covering naming conventions, formatting, error handling, and comments. Good guidelines should include concrete examples of correct and incorrect code, ideally a 'gold standard' file showing all conventions applied together. Treat agent mistakes as feedback to iteratively improve the guidelines, and keep the standards file as a living document maintained collaboratively by the engineering team. Traditional tools like linters and static analysis still play a role alongside agent-specific rules files like agents.md.

Building shared coding guidelines for AI (and people too)