Overview

Section 12 · Rules Of Operation — SOPs, ADRs, AGENTS.md, skills as operating rules, versioning and change tracking.

9 lessons.

By the end of this section you can¶

Put each instruction in the cheapest layer that works: rule, skill, hook, CI gate, ADR or SOP.
Write an SOP, an ADR and an AGENTS.md that an agent can actually follow.
Turn a procedure you just performed into a skill, and test it in a fresh session.
Track changes so that 'when did this ship?' has an answer.

Rules Of Operation: The Full Stack ¶

beginner · ~15 min — You tell an agent "run the formatter before you commit" and it works — for that session. Tomorrow the session starts blank, the agent commits unformatted code, and CI goes red.

Writing SOPs ¶

intermediate · ~18 min — It is 2am, production is down, and the person who last deployed is asleep.

ADRs In Practice ¶

intermediate · ~18 min — Six weeks after you choose an authentication scheme, an agent reads the code, decides the current approach is unusual, and proposes to "fix" it.

AGENTS.md That Actually Works ¶

intermediate · ~18 min — The rules file is the one document your agent reads before every task.

Skills As Operating Rules ¶

intermediate · ~18 min — You have a procedure. It lives in a wiki page nobody reads, or in the head of whoever ran it last.

Creating Skills With Hermes ¶

intermediate · ~20 min — You just spent forty minutes working out how to deploy a change without breaking the schema order, and you will forget all of it by Friday.

Change Tracking ¶

beginner · ~15 min — Two weeks after a release, something breaks and nobody knows which change did it.

Versioning And Release Notes ¶

intermediate · ~15 min — A version number is a promise. Publishing 1.4.0 tells every client, script and mobile app what it can assume about the code behind that number.

Rules Of Operation Exercises ¶

intermediate · ~25 min — Reading about operating rules changes nothing.

← 11. Documentation · Home · Sidebar · 13. Team & Process →