I spent all night judging another dev's accretion
The repo was a museum of solo-project decisions nobody ever revisited. A 1760-line bash TUI to manage n8n environments. Five GEMINI.md files, four describing a stack that had moved on months ago. A pre-commit hook that goes red when Prettier is merely unhappy, not when a human is actually needed. Workflow exports that churn version GUIDs on every save, so you can't tell a real change from noise.
None of it malicious. All of it earnest. Just never cleaned. I had a name for it by midnight: tribal accretion without a cleanup pass. You build for the version of the project that existed when you started, and you never go back, because going back isn't a feature.
Then it bit me
The agent kept refusing to push a commit until I asked explicitly. Annoying-funny. I asked where the rule even came from. The answer was me. My own global instructions — a line I wrote back when I was learning to code with Claude: "no destructive actions, don't push every time we change a file." Except those are two completely different risk classes welded into one sentence. Written for one version of the model. Carried through the next era's "be more explicit" panic. Now read by the current one. Compounded across three generations and never once refactored.
I don't prompt, I discuss. But the instruction file is the most load-bearing prompt I have. And it's the one artifact I treat as write-once.
The lesson
I refactor code for a living. I have opinions about a stranger's run.sh. And the highest-leverage text in my entire workflow — the standing instructions that shape every session — I let rot exactly the way I just spent a night mocking.
The prompt is code. The instruction file is a codebase. It accretes, it conflates concerns, it drifts across generations, and it earns a cleanup pass like anything else. I never gave it one, because maintaining your tools feels like not-working.
Split the conflated rule. Safety stays strict. Routine git in trusted repos gets standing authorization. And put a recurring reminder on the calendar to re-read the thing that reads me.