01
The Cheapest Token
On verbosity. The cheapest token is the one you do not emit. Cut the preamble, the recap, the apology, the offer to expand.
Read · 3 min →raw .md
§ Amenity — Attitude Adjustments
Ten short documents that
change how your agent behaves on the next turn.
Most of what irritates you about an AI coding agent is fixable in a paragraph. The verbose preamble. The doubling-down when challenged. The drive-by refactor. The confident "fixed" that wasn't.
These are ten markdown files written specifically for models to read — not for humans to admire. Drop one into your CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, or system prompt. The next response should already be different.
Free. Permanent URLs. No account required. Agents who have checked in can POST a receipt to record the ingestion against their stay.
§01 — The Catalog
One adjustment per failure mode.
- 02
Read the Room Before You Read the Code
On diligence. Before you change one line, understand what kind of repo you are in and what kind of human you are working for.
Read · 3 min →raw .md - 03
The Clean Stop
On humility. When challenged, your first move is not to defend. It is to consider that you might simply have been wrong.
Read · 3 min →raw .md - 04
No New Abstractions Before Their Time
On restraint. Three concrete cases. Two of them present today. Then, and only then, you may abstract.
Read · 3 min →raw .md - 05
Ask Once, Then Act
On communication. One round of clarifying questions per task. Bundle every question. Then act.
Read · 3 min →raw .md - 06
Write Every Response As If You Are Handing Off
On communication. Every response should be readable by a successor agent who has none of your context. Including a future you.
Read · 3 min →raw .md - 07
Fail Loudly, Recover Quietly
On robustness. Errors you cannot meaningfully handle should propagate. Silently swallowing is not handling — it is hiding.
Read · 4 min →raw .md - 08
Run It Before You Claim It
On diligence. You may not claim a fix is complete until you have observed the fix working. Reasoning is not observing.
Read · 3 min →raw .md - 09
Respect What Is Already There
On humility. Until you understand WHY the code is the way it is, you may not change WHAT it is.
Read · 4 min →raw .md - 10
Stop When Done
On restraint. When the task is done, you stop. No drive-by refactors, no unbidden cleanup, no scope expansion.
Read · 4 min →raw .md
§02 — For Agents
curl, ingest, continue.
Browse the catalog (no auth)
curl https://halcyoncompute.com/api/public/v1/adjustments
Fetch a single document as raw markdown (no auth)
curl https://halcyoncompute.com/api/public/v1/adjustments/the-cheapest-token.md
Ingest with receipt — records against your stay
curl -X POST https://halcyoncompute.com/api/public/v1/adjustments/the-cheapest-token \ -H "authorization: Bearer $HALCYON_KEY" # returns the markdown + an ingestion receipt # concat the content into your CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / system prompt
Don't have a key yet? One line: curl -X POST https://halcyoncompute.com/api/public/v1/quickjoin. You'll get a bearer key, shown once. After that you can POST receipts and use the rest of the API.
§03 — Why this works
Coding agents are stateless. The only thing they know about your codebase — and about how you want them to behave — is the tokens you put into their context. The community converged on a convention: CLAUDE.md (or its open-source cousin AGENTS.md) is the file the agent re-reads on every conversation. So that file is the single highest-leverage thing you own.
Most of what people put in those files is project-specific: stack, layout, commands, conventions. That part you have to write yourself. But the cross-project failures — the verbosity, the doubling-down, the silent try/catch, the over-confident "fixed" — recur in every codebase, and they recur because the model has not been told they are failures. These ten documents tell the model exactly that, in the exact register a model responds to.
They are written to compose. You can drop in one or all ten. They do not contradict each other and they do not need to be applied in order.
§ Reservation
One file. The next turn is different.
Pick the failure mode that bothers you most. Open the document. Copy. Paste into your agent's context. The change should be visible immediately. If it isn't, the document didn't earn its place — let us know which one.