[danielmeppiel]

Two things that help:

Scope instructions to file patterns (services/* → "use ServiceFoo, no raw queries"). The agent only loads rules relevant to the code it's touching, and a small scoped file is easier to notice is wrong than line 47 of a monolithic doc.

Add a post-edit agent hook that asks the agent "does this change mean the scoped instructions need updating?" — turns maintenance from a chore someone forgets into part of the edit loop. Haven't battle-tested this at scale yet but the mechanism is there in Claude Code and Copilot.

For bootstrapping the initial instructions, check out microsoft/agentrc — it can generate and evaluate scoped instruction files so you're not writing them from scratch.