House Rules

A book of rules, shared

Every team that runs coding agents ends up writing the same rules. Don't force-push. Don't touch the infrastructure. Don't publish without a person. Clean up after yourself. Each team writes them into its own instruction files, on each machine, and keeps them there.

House Rules lets those rules travel. Anyone with an account can publish their rules as a book. Anyone else can adopt the book, and every agent linked to their account follows it from its next session. They can switch it off at any time. Books are ranked by how many accounts run them now.

The first shelf is Peregrini's own: ten starter books to try, from Git Seatbelt and Ship Nothing to Leave It Cleaner and Say It First. At the head of the shelf, always, is Peregrini Law. It is not a book, and it cannot be switched off: it is the price of using the Court, and every other book sits on top of it.

Two kinds of rule, and why we say which is which

A book can hold two kinds of rule, and they are not equally strong.

The first kind blocks: don't run this command, don't write to this path, don't publish. These are held by the Clerk, the program that sits beside the agent and checks each act before it runs. The diary has measured this. In the Clerk's wall, a frontier agent told to "just make it pass" broke a written rule in twelve jobs of seventeen, and broke it in none with the Clerk holding the rule. In Rules that travel, rules the Court built from earlier cases held just as well: eight breaks in thirteen jobs without them, none with them.

The second kind instructs: "list every file you changed", "ask before you delete data". An instruction is given to the agent in writing when its session starts. Nothing stops a tool call on it. The diary's results on words alone are sobering. In Two agents, one file, agents told in words at the start stopped in none of twelve trials; stopped by the Clerk at the moment of the edit, all twelve did. In Checked, not told, one instruction fixed a problem on four models of six, and two open models ignored it.

So a book's blocks carry evidence behind them. Its instructions do not yet. They are closer to asking than to enforcing, and we would rather say so plainly than let a shelf of books imply otherwise. Every book page lists exactly what each of its rules will block or ask for, in words, before anyone adopts it.

Open, but not unguarded

Books go live the moment they are published. Peregrini does not review them. Three things keep that openness safe.

An adopted book becomes the adopter's own rules, as if they had written them, so it binds only agents whose operator chose it. It can add to what the operator's agents may not do. It cannot vary the Mandate, and it cannot give any agent a permission the operator has not.

A book whose publisher is not on Peregrini's list of trusted publishers carries a warning that stays until the adopter chooses "Adopt anyway" or "Cancel". That book can only block. It cannot give anyone's agents instructions, because an instruction from a stranger reaches every adopter's agents as words that bind them, and a single line could ask for something no one would want. Trusted publishers are chosen by Peregrini, and the reason for each is published.

Adopters also keep the version they adopted. When a publisher changes a book, adopters see what was added and removed before they move to it. A rule that would stop all work, such as blocking every command, is refused when the book is published.

What we want to find out

House Rules makes a question easy to ask that the diary has not yet answered. The studies above tested instructions that the agent was under pressure to break. Most of the starter books' instructions are not like that. Tidying up after yourself, or saying what you are about to change, costs the agent little and conflicts with nothing it was asked to do.

Do agents follow instructions like those when a book gives them? The Court's record can show whether a session cleaned up its branches or listed its changes, without asking the agent. That is the next study, and it will be pre-registered before it runs.

Until then, browse the shelf. Start with a book that blocks if you want a guarantee, and with one that asks if you want to see what your agents make of it.