Repository Instructions Are Becoming Engineering Artifacts. Treat Them Like It.

Repository instruction files such as CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and .cursorrules are now critical engineering artifacts that coding agents use to generate, modify, and review code, yet most teams treat them as informal notes without ownership or review. Experts argue these files should be managed with the same rigor as CI config and dependency manifests to ensure code quality and consistency.

Your team already treats CI config, dependency manifests, and policy files as things that need an owner, a review, and a drift check, because they shape the code you ship. Repository instruction files like CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and .cursorrules now do the same job: coding agents read them to decide how to generate, modify, and review code. But most of them currently sit outside all of it and are edited like notes, owned by no one and reviewed by nobody.