Possibly. But telling it in a rules file eats significantly less context than if it needs to read a bunch of files every time just to find what "conformant" mea

Possibly. But telling it in a rules file eats significantly less context than if it needs to read a bunch of files every time just to find what "conformant" means. AGENTS.md is a poor substitute for agents actually learning, but it somewhat works. And sure, you can (and should) enforce constraints via githooks whenever you can (determinism is good), but if the agent only finds out at checkin time, it's created a whole bunch of code it needs to redo, and that doesn't run properly if you do the caveman thing and actually run your code before committing. Again, token & context waste.