- All playbooks
- Write the review questions you keep repeating into AGENTS.md
Write the review questions you keep repeating into AGENTS.md
Scoped repository rules let an agent reviewer catch what a reader of the diff would miss.
Company examples
How OpenAI used this technique
Read what OpenAI changed and follow the original sources.
Write the review questions you keep repeating into AGENTS.md
OpenAI's Codex Code Review applies short, scoped rules from AGENTS.md and cites the rule in a finding. The team puts repository-wide rules at the root and service-specific rules in the nested AGENTS.md of that directory, states the invariant together with the safe path, and keeps formatting and other mechanical checks in CI.
In OpenAI's primary evaluation suite of known rule violations and safe counterexamples, rule-guided variants recovered 98% of the required custom findings, compared with 58.3% in the baseline control Source
- Use it when
- Reviewers keep explaining the same compatibility requirement or data boundary on pull requests.
- Before applying it
- Start with two or three rules, then try one change that should trigger each, one safe counterexample and one unrelated change. Narrow or remove a rule that repeatedly produces noise.
Company Playbooks
- Read Anthropic’s playbookRun only affected tests
- Read DoorDash’s playbookRun build and test in parallel, sharded across CI agents
- Read Linear’s playbookBenchmark the same job on faster hardware
- Read Mastra’s playbookStarSling runners for the slowest test workflow
- Read OpenAI’s playbookRank CI fixes by the minutes they save
- Read Ramp’s playbookMove a CPU-bound test suite to a faster CPU
- Read Shopify’s playbookLet an agent iterate against one CI metric
- Read Spotify’s playbookBuild arm64 on native arm64 runners
- Read Stripe’s playbookRun only the tests a change can reach
- Read Uber’s playbookBuild the merge-queue speculations most likely to be needed