What it means in practice
Picture onboarding a new colleague, except you never have to repeat it. You write down how work is done here in a single file, and the AI reads it before every task, just as attentively every time.
It typically covers:
- how you structure projects and what your design looks like
- security rules and rules for handling data
- the testing and validation checklist
- how you work with git and pull requests
- links to the knowledge base and sample data
Why it pays off for companies
The most common management worry about fast development with AI is: “Won’t this turn into chaos, with everyone building their own way?” The answer is a rules file. Fast development with AI can perfectly well hold to a single company standard; it just has to be written down once.
In the Vibe coding in business workshop, every participant starts from a repository that already has this file. It is not theory: when twenty people build twenty prototypes, the difference between shared rules and no rules is immediately visible.
Related
This is the practical form of context engineering. The difference is that the context here is not one-off. It lives in the project and applies to everyone who works in it.