How to Write a CLAUDE.md Rule That Actually Gets Enforced

Open a CLAUDE.md file at random and you'll find build commands, architecture notes, and rules. The rules tend to be the unenforceable kind. "Write clean code." "Be careful with types." "Follow our conventions." The author meant every word. The agent reads them. And nothing checks whether the agent followed them, because nothing can. In a corpus of 580 CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and .cursorrules files from public GitHub repos with 10+ stars, 74% contained zero machine-extractable rules . Not because t