Standing Rules Instead of Permission Prompts

Ashley Childress spent four and a half months rebuilding how she works with AI coding agents, and the core move is a good one: stop treating permission prompts as your safety system. Clicking "approve" forty times per task is not oversight — it is fatigue theater. She replaced it with 134 standing rules that define what the agent may do up front.

What the guide covers

• Why click-to-approve stops being a real guardrail once volume goes up.
• How to write standing rules that constrain behavior instead of interrupting it.
• Treating the agent like a direct report: context, expectations, and review at the right altitude.
• Nine concrete practice changes, each with the reasoning and evidence behind it.

Why it is worth your time

This is the rare "here is how I do things differently" post that shows its work. It is especially relevant now that agents are being handed more autonomy by default — the guardrails have to move from per-action prompts to written policy, and this is a working example of what that looks like.

Read it on dev.to.