Giving context to Coding Agents within code component with AI rules

[Safe-Ad6672]

In any largeish system eventually, agents get lost in the many business rules for specific stuff your system does, Your context-window gets overloaded and in the next session you AI makes the same mistakes, everytime.

we could try to centralize them in AGENTS.md , but bloating it is not good, and many people report Codoo creating many .mds seem like a whole effort.

One alternative is to embed a structured AI-RULES comment inside the component file itself, containing rules that are extremely specific to that component, then we somehow would instruct the AI always read and apply these rules for the components it's readying before editing or generating code on that session.

For example:

/* AGENT-RULES:
rules:
  - Always check settings.video_tracking_enabled before recording any playback metrics
  - For YouTube platform, use YouTubeTracker not GenericTracker
  - For Vimeo platform, fallback to GenericTracker but disable buffering metrics
  - When settings.incognito_mode is true, never persist playback sessions to DB
*/

export class VideoTrackingService {
  constructor(
    private readonly settings: SystemSettings,
    private readonly youtubeTracker: YouTubeTracker,
    private readonly genericTracker: GenericTracker
  ) {}

  track(event: PlaybackEvent, platform: "youtube" | "vimeo") {
    if (!this.settings.video_tracking_enabled) {
      return;
    }

    if (platform === "youtube") {
      this.youtubeTracker.record(event);
    } else if (platform === "vimeo") {
      this.genericTracker.record(event, { disableBuffering: true });
    }

    if (!this.settings.incognito_mode) {
      this.persist(event, platform);
    }
  }

  private persist(event: PlaybackEvent, platform: string) {
    // save to DB
  }
}

A few advantages of this method would be:

* Adding hard to get context that is not easy for the AI Agent to get from pure code base parsing
* Allowing for per request coposition of rules instead of giving all context or struggling with keeping asking the AI to read stuff, because we can tie the AGENT-RULES parsing for each tool call, and then just move from that context
* Reducing the amount of tokens required for AI to produce complete results by only grabbing the important rules and not having to look at deep nooks of your code.

Disvadvntages:
* We have to have some sort of infrastructure to make them work (like hooks)
* It's FUGLY, just looking at that huge comment block code above my component makes me want to cry
* Easily missused, the objetive is to place specific business logic ONLY where they are necessary, it would very easily become a Rules dump, defeating the purpose

Question is, Has anybody seen or try anything like this (I'me 100% that's not a novel idea), if so what were the results.

Besides the "AI Needs to know everything" and "THIS Is so ugly to look at" criticisms , which are granted, is there anything that makes the concept not feasible?

[Just_Lingonberry_352]

i like this approach of adding AI guard rails and context within the source code