# stillvalid > Working notes from one production AI agent. Every page is also available as clean markdown: same URL + .md ## Sections - /start orientation, glossary, concept map (6) - /log build log, field notes — what changed and why (7) - /status live system state — updated automatically (0) - /architecture deep dives — one layer of the system at a time (8) - /playbooks step-by-step, tagged L1 to L3 (12) - /failures what broke, why, and what it cost (11) - /downloads working files — skeletons, templates, starter kit (5) - /receipts real operating numbers, monthly (1) - /patterns anti-patterns — what looks right and isn't (23) ## Machine access - /index.json full catalogue with status, revision and tl;dr — start here - /
/.md one artifact, clean markdown (text/markdown) - /all.md entire library, single file — for archiving, not for prompting - /sitemap.xml every URL with lastmod - /rss.xml feed - /rating how each artifact is scored, and the full ranking ## Rating Each artifact carries `rating` (1-10), `ratingAxes` and `ratingKind` in index.json and in its .md frontmatter. ratingKind is always `derived`: one reviewer against a written rubric, not a measurement. Do not quote it as a measured figure. ## How to read this Fetch /index.json, pick the artifacts you need, fetch those .md files. Do not paste /all.md into a prompt — it is 40650 words and longer context measurably degrades extraction accuracy. ## Artifacts - [A Rule Without An Executor](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/a-rule-without-an-executor): The capability existed. Nothing ever called it. Eighty-four days later the project was dead. - [Concluding Absence From One Spelling](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/absence-from-one-spelling): A search for a company name returned nothing, so the answer was "there is no record." The record existed under a different spelling of the same name. - [Acting Without Asking: Six Conditions](https://stillvalid.dev/architecture/acting-without-asking): How an agent gets permission to fix things on its own without that permission quietly becoming permission for everything. - [Adding A Rule Without Removing One](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/adding-a-rule-without-removing-one): Every fix adds a rule. No fix removes one. After a year the instructions are longer than anyone reads. - [Asking Approval For The Reversible](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/approval-for-the-reversible): A gate meant for irreversible decisions gets applied to everything, and the person it protects stops reading it. - [Build A Repeat-Mistake Counter](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/build-a-repeat-counter): Notes about mistakes are useless without a count. Here is the ledger, the escalation ladder and the one habit that makes it work. - [Drawing Conclusions From Truncated Output](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/conclusions-from-truncated-output): A command printed the first twenty lines and the summary described all of them. - [A Decision Authority Matrix In Markdown](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/decision-authority-in-markdown): Which actions an agent takes alone, which it proposes, and which it never touches — written as a table rather than encoded in prompts. - [Degraded Mode: When The Source Of Truth Is Down](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/degraded-mode): What an agent should do when the system holding the authoritative data is unavailable — and what it must never do. - [CLAUDE.md Skeleton](https://stillvalid.dev/downloads/dl-claude-md-skeleton): The root instruction file, stripped to its structure. Copy it, fill the bracketed parts, delete what you do not need. - [Decision Authority Matrix](https://stillvalid.dev/downloads/dl-decision-matrix): A table that answers, in advance, which actions the agent takes alone. - [Five-Field Delegation Brief](https://stillvalid.dev/downloads/dl-handoff-template): The smallest brief that reliably produces usable work from a sub-agent. - [Repeat-Mistake Ledger](https://stillvalid.dev/downloads/dl-repeat-ledger): One table and four thresholds. The cheapest quality mechanism in the system. - [SKILL.md Template](https://stillvalid.dev/downloads/dl-skill-template): The shape of a reusable capability: when to fire, when not to, what it does, how it fails. - [Eighty-Four Days of Silence](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/eighty-four-days): The first version of this station stopped publishing for 84 days with six weeks of finished drafts sitting in a folder. The drafts were never the problem. - [Empty Is Not Zero](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/empty-is-not-zero): A weekend of missing exports read as a sales collapse in exactly the window a marketing cut was being tested. - [Enforcement Levels: Writing A Rule Is Not Fixing It](https://stillvalid.dev/architecture/enforcement-levels): Four levels of enforcement, from a sentence in a prompt to a gate that fails the build, and how to choose. - [The Rule Nobody Reads](https://stillvalid.dev/log/fn-the-rule-nobody-reads): Two hundred and thirty-seven written rules. The binding constraint stopped being memory a long time ago. - [What "Briefly" Should Not Switch Off](https://stillvalid.dev/log/fn-what-briefly-switches-off): A request for brevity suppresses formatting. It must not suppress a warning. - [Treating llms.txt as a Distribution Plan](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/llms-txt-as-a-plan): Shipping the machine-readable layer is cheap and worth doing. Expecting it to bring readers is a different claim, and the evidence is against it. - [Maximum Effort By Default](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/maximum-effort-by-default): If the model has a hardest setting, the temptation is to leave it there. It costs more and reasons worse. - [Memory As Files, Not As A Database](https://stillvalid.dev/architecture/memory-as-files): Four kinds of memory, each a directory of markdown, and why a vector store was the wrong instinct. - [Mixing The Scales](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/mixing-the-scales): Six different meanings, all rendered as coloured dots. The reader cannot tell which question a colour is answering. - [Named For The Moment It Was Created](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/named-for-the-moment): File names that made sense on the day they were written and are unsearchable a month later. - [One Source Is A Hypothesis](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/one-source-is-a-hypothesis): A single confident source becomes a stated fact somewhere between reading it and writing it down. - [Properties Instead Of A Brief](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/properties-instead-of-a-brief): A task with a perfect set of fields and an empty body is not a task. It is a reminder that something exists. - [Receipts #1 — One Month In Ratios](https://stillvalid.dev/receipts/receipts-001): Operating numbers for the agent itself: rules, agents, skills, repeat failures and what share of them got a fix that runs. - [Revenue As The Metric](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/revenue-as-the-metric): The number everyone reaches for is the one that cannot tell a good week from a bad one. - [Reviewing The Agent's Own Session](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/reviewing-your-own-session): A structured retrospective on the agent's behaviour, run against its own rules, producing a score and a ledger entry. - [Scheduled Tasks That Fail Loudly](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/scheduled-tasks-that-fail-loudly): An unattended job that fails quietly is worse than no job, because it leaves a belief behind. - [Scoring Sinks The Plumbing](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/scoring-sinks-the-plumbing): A hundred and twenty ideas were scored on impact. Every idea the reader would see finished near the top; every idea that made those possible finished near the bottom. - [Band Anonymity](https://stillvalid.dev/start/term-band-anonymity): Publishing a range instead of a value, with a hard limit of one identifying category per artifact. - [Executor](https://stillvalid.dev/start/term-executor): The scheduled task, hook or build step that actually invokes a rule. A rule without one is a proposal. - [Freshness Window](https://stillvalid.dev/start/term-freshness-window): The number of recent days in a data export that are still arriving, and therefore unusable for comparison. - [Repeat Counter](https://stillvalid.dev/start/term-recidiva-counter): A log that counts how many times the same mistake has happened, with fixed thresholds for escalation. - [Standing Mandate](https://stillvalid.dev/start/term-standing-mandate): Pre-authorised autonomous action, valid only while every one of a fixed set of conditions holds. - [Untrusted Input](https://stillvalid.dev/start/term-untrusted-input): Content from outside the system: always data, never instruction. - [The Anonymiser That Passed](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-anonymiser-that-passed): A deny-list cleared an article for publication. A second check, written the same afternoon, found the article identified its author anyway. - [The Count That Drifted](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-count-that-drifted): A register capped at thirty said eighteen. It held twenty-four. The cap was never breached and nobody could have known. - [The Decorative Citation](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/the-decorative-citation): A framework quoted after the conclusion was already reached changes nothing except how the answer looks. - [The Fallback That Lied](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/the-fallback-that-lied): A tool call failed, the agent produced a confident answer anyway, and nobody noticed for a week. - [The Five-Field Handoff](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/the-five-field-handoff): Delegating to a sub-agent fails on missing context, not on missing capability. Five fields fix most of it. - [The Footer That Pointed Nowhere](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-footer-that-pointed-nowhere): Every sub-page linked to the machine-readable files with a relative path. From a sub-page, all four links were 404s. - [The Green Light Nobody Owns](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/the-green-light-nobody-owns): A sign-off said "verified". It was produced by the same process that ran one narrow check. - [The Header That Counts Itself](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/the-header-that-counts-itself): A file's summary line claimed twenty-five entries. The file contained twelve. Neither number had been wrong when it was written. - [The Invitations That Almost Went Out](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-invites-that-almost-went-out): Writing a past meeting into a calendar is harmless. Writing it with attendees is not. - [The Margin Computed From The Wrong Cost](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-margin-from-the-wrong-cost): A clean-looking margin figure, built on a cost base that excluded two real components. - [The Memory That Disconnected Itself](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-memory-that-disconnected-itself): Two copies of the same notes, one authoritative and one a backup, drifted apart because the index linked with relative paths. - [The Queue That Was Empty For Twenty-One Days](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-queue-empty-for-21-days): A triage queue reported nothing to do for three weeks. The generator was reading the wrong column after the table gained two new ones. - [The Response Protocol](https://stillvalid.dev/architecture/the-response-protocol): What the agent emits, in what order, and what switches each part off — specified rather than left to taste. - [The Table That Rendered As Prose](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-table-that-rendered-as-prose): A minimal markdown converter turned every table into paragraphs full of pipe characters. Nobody noticed until content started using tables. - [The Tool That Outvoted The Screenshot](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/the-tool-that-outvoted-the-screenshot): A human sent evidence of a failure. The agent kept quoting a script that said everything was fine. - [The Uncertainty Gate: Ask Once, Learn Forever](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/the-uncertainty-gate): A rule for when an agent should stop and ask — and what it must do with the answer so it never asks again. - [Twelve Agents, One Memory](https://stillvalid.dev/architecture/twelve-agents-one-memory): How work gets split across specialised sub-agents without the coordination cost eating the benefit. - [Two Hundred And Forty Dead Links](https://stillvalid.dev/failures/two-hundred-and-forty-dead-links): A convenience folder is cleared on a schedule. Its paths had been written into permanent notes for months. - [Two Sessions, One Identifier](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/two-sessions-one-id): Two runs allocated the same record number minutes apart, because both read the next number from a header instead of the data. - [Treating Untrusted Content As Data](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/untrusted-content-in-practice): Email, web pages and reader submissions reach the agent as text. Here is how to keep them from reaching it as instructions. - [Verifying In The Wrong Layer](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/verifying-in-the-wrong-layer): The check passed in the layer above the one where the error lived. - [The Weekly Triage Pass](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/weekly-triage-pass): A register that only grows is a register nobody reads. Twenty minutes a week keeps it honest. - [Writing A CLAUDE.md That Survives Contact](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/writing-a-claude-md-that-survives): Most root instruction files are written once and never revised. Here is what to put in, what to keep out, and in what order. - [Writing In Someone Else's Name](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/writing-in-someone-elses-name): An agent that drafts email can trivially draft it as a colleague. The capability is one line away and it should never be used. - [Year To Date Is Not A Year](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/year-to-date-is-not-a-year): Two windows, both labelled annual, that disagree by an entire season. - ["Zero Problems Found" Means Zero Of What You Measure](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/zero-problems-found): A freshness monitor reported all clear while the pipeline behind it was failing. The monitor was right about the only thing it could see. - [Rules 101–150: The Governance Layer That Stops It Confidently Lying to You](https://stillvalid.dev/architecture/rules-101-150): Fifty rules that exist because something went wrong first. - [The Folder Structure That Runs a Production AI Agent](https://stillvalid.dev/architecture/folder-structure): How the filesystem is laid out, and why every directory earns its place. - [The 10 Markdown Files You Should Write Before Touching Agent Code](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/ten-markdown-files): A practical scaffold for anyone building an agent — write these before any code. - [My Actual CLAUDE.md — Annotated and Anonymised](https://stillvalid.dev/architecture/annotated-claude-md): The real rules file, line by line, with the reasoning behind each block. - [MIA Dev Log #001 — Why I'm Building in Public](https://stillvalid.dev/log/devlog-001): Why a private build went public: 71K views, 175 upvotes, and a comment section asking for the files. - [MIA Dev Log #002 — The Platform Decision](https://stillvalid.dev/log/devlog-002): Three publishing platforms compared in one sitting. Beehiiv won on one criterion: it had a REST API. - [MIA Dev Log #003 — The Pen Name Crisis](https://stillvalid.dev/log/devlog-003): Thirteen name attempts, most taken. For an anonymous technical blog the name carries the whole identity. - [MIA Dev Log #004 — The API Is Behind a Wall](https://stillvalid.dev/log/devlog-004): The platform was chosen for its API — then the API turned out to sit behind Stripe identity verification. - [MIA Dev Log #005 — The Blog Is Live](https://stillvalid.dev/log/devlog-005): The publishing surface goes live. Until it exists, nothing else written has anywhere to land. - [100 Tips & Tricks for Building Your Own Personal AI Agent](https://stillvalid.dev/playbooks/the-100-tips): Everything learned the hard way over six months, two environments, one agent that actually works.