Prose Isn't Policy: Stop Writing Claude.md Rules

The whole LLM development revolution has made me feel like I’m taking crazy pills, and this is one of those observations.

And, as someone who does a decent amount of vibe coding -

Are we really turning engineering into plain text and not a like agreeably defined spec? Is that how we’re writing applications now?

That a list of instructions that may not have an agreed upon definition or compilation process to ensure they’re internally consistent - that’s the foundation of modern change management?

It's not the usage of AI so much as a seeming enthusiasm that this generation of tools are necessarily the right ones.

It's kinda weird because I think this almost loops back on itself, but a fundamental question is like - what is the difference between AI and a library?

What's the difference between typing say "I want to reach out to the google API and get a json blob of my e-mail" and "axios.get(google.com/e-mail)"

What's the difference between "Build me a login screen" and having a good set of react components you can quickly compose into a login screen.

As sort of illustrated in the article. It seems more reliable and potentially less expensive to have a layer that can sort of say "This line here, it's covered by this library/git hook, we'll actually pull it out, replace it with a deterministic layer and maybe put it in a spec that's ignored or verified by LLMs to have the deterministic component, but not interpreted by LLMs"