House Rules: Skills and Contracts That Keep AI Agents on Your Game's Standard

An AI assistant can move quickly and still make every session feel like a restart. You repeat what a sketch means, which service to use, where files belong, and what must be checked, while the work slowly drifts toward the assistant's defaults.

In House Rules, I explain how I give later sessions a durable starting point. Standing rules record what is true in a project. Skills preserve the procedure for recurring jobs. Contracts capture workflows that already worked, including their stages, approvals, file destinations, self-review, and lessons.

The book shows how I layer those documents so every fact has one owner, separate durable procedures from live information, turn review corrections into lasting standards, and keep exceptions dated and narrow. It also covers scoped batch authorization, preflight checks before paid actions, release gates that fail closed, and project hygiene that is part of finishing rather than an afterthought.

No programming background is required. These are plain-language documents for solo developers and creators who direct AI-assisted game work. The rules make the work steadier; they do not approve it. I still inspect the result, maintain the standards, and decide what enters the game.