Real Engineering Prompt: Minimal Behavioural Directives for Coding Agents

RepositoryGonChen/real-engineering-promptResource

This open-source project offers a concise instruction template (AGENTS.md) designed to bind modern coding agents to core engineering practices like minimal complexity, scoped modifications, and evidence-backed verification.

Key points

  1. Avoids persona prompts and generic programming rules to focus strictly on observable behavioural constraints.
  2. Restricts edits to what is strictly necessary, explicitly ruling out speculative refactoring and broad reformatting.
  3. Mandates empirical proof of completion using the strongest available evidence, such as tests, builds, or benchmark runs.
  4. Handles ambiguity pragmatically by resolving low-risk details via context while escalating substantive design or safety decisions.
  5. Draws on ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English concepts to keep technical output clear and separate facts from assumptions.

Why it matters

Modern coding agents already know programming languages and design patterns, making lengthy instruction files redundant. Focusing purely on targeted constraints reduces context noise and prevents common agent failures during implementation.

Analysis

Created by GonChen, this is an early-stage project (4 stars, updated August 2026) containing purely Markdown instruction sets without tooling or runtime dependencies. It targets software engineers using coding agents who want to prevent scope creep, untested assumptions, and unnecessary interruptions. The design includes an AGENTS.spare.md file with inactive candidate rules, allowing teams to incrementally adopt instructions only when specific agent failure modes occur.

Mentioned links

Found in

Summary generated by AI (Gemini 3.8 Flash, 27 September 2026). It may contain errors – the original source is authoritative.

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