The Curator's Role: Managing a Codebase With an Agent

The Simplest Thing That Could Work There's a temptation, when you decide to "use AI for software development," to build something complicated. A custom orchestration layer. A RAG pipeline over your codebase. A fine-tuned model trained on your conventions. A plugin ecosystem. I used Markdown files. The entire agent harness for this project is plain Markdown, checked into the repo, loaded automatically by Claude Code based on which directory you're working in. No custom tooling. No infrastructure. No maintenance burden. CLAUDE.md ← Root guidance app/Actions/CLAUDE.md ← Action patterns app/Services/CLAUDE.md ← Service patterns tests/CLAUDE.md ← Test patterns resources/js/spa/CLAUDE.md ← SPA patterns ...9 files total That's it. Nine Markdown files. The agent reads them, follows them, and produces code that matches the project's conventions. I want to be very clear about this because the industry is drowning in complexity around AI tooling: the simplest approach worked. Not as a starting po