You teach an agent your conventions by writing them down where it'll read them—naming rules, folder structure, preferred libraries, testing style—usually in a memory or config file it loads on every task. Say it once, in the right place, and you stop repeating yourself every session.
The ways to encode conventions:
- Inline instructions — best for one-off tasks, forgotten by the next.
- Example-driven prompting — best for showing rather than telling.
- Persistent memory files, as tools like Verdent support — best for rules that should apply everywhere, every time.
Verdent applies recorded conventions across tasks and parallel agents, reducing the chance that one agent follows your style while another invents its own. The result should require fewer style-correction cycles, though the output still needs review.
The question to start with: what do I keep fixing in this agent's output? Those recurring corrections are your convention list, already written—you just have to move them into the file.
Draft a short conventions file today and refine it as you catch drift. It pays back within a handful of tasks.
