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Patrick Colm Audley

Patrick Colm Audley

Hacker · Full-Spectrum Technologist · Polymath

Engineering principles should be runnable policy, not slide-deck nostalgia

The thing I keep running into with multi-agent setups is that the engineering principles a team actually cares about — how to handle errors, when to wrap shell calls, what counts as a critical path — live in a wiki page or a slide deck nobody reads. That's already a problem for humans; for an LLM agent it is a guarantee of policy violation.

coding-ethos is the position I've taken: those principles belong in a single coding_ethos.yml file, and from that one file the build emits everything that needs to know about them — CLAUDE.md / GEMINI.md agent instructions, Ruff / Pyright / golangci-lint configs, compiled Go pre-commit hooks, agent tool-use guards, and an MCP server the agent can query at runtime.

The key invariant: the engine that writes the markdown rules is the exact same engine that evaluates CEL expressions at the git-hook level. They cannot drift. If the hook denies an action, the agent gets back a structured skill_id hint instead of a generic exit code — so the feedback loop closes inside the agent's own context rather than landing on a human's screen.

Heavily opinionated, currently slanted toward Python and Go, in active development. Posted on r/GeminiCLI with worked examples; read the original thread if you want the implementation walk-through, and feature requests are welcome on the repo.

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