The Demotion Ladder: A Year of Governing Claude Code

I thought that if I wrote my feedback down, the agent would work through it like a checklist. And for a while that theory held. Every time I caught something in review, I'd write the rule into a doc, and the next run would be a bit better than the last one. With two or three rules in play, this works fine, and it feels great, because you can watch the thing pick up your conventions in a day.

I've been running agents on my own product since May 2025, a real production system with roughly 1,000 endpoints and all the usual pieces: generated API contracts, exports to Excel and PDF, notifications built on the same logic as reminders, naming conventions, a page template system, and the exceptions to all of that. Over those 14 months, the rules doc became rules docs, around 18 files of 250 to 750 lines...

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