Vibecoding: AI Rules Files Generator

If You Build With AI, You Need This File. And The System That Generates It. A Beginner-Friendly System for Replit, Cursor, Gemini & Claude Builders. The Problem With Every AI Rules File I’ve Seen AI Rules Files are instruction manuals for your coding agent. They’re just markdown files that sit in your repo and tell the AI what conventions to follow, what technologies to use, what patterns to avoid. You’ll see them under different names: replit.md, agents.md, cursor.md, claude.md, constitution.md - but they all serve one purpose: to give your coding agent a playbook. Without them, agents improvise. With them, they follow your rules. Since starting with AI-assisted coding, I’ve analyzed a small mountain of repos. Studied how skilled engineers structure their AI files. Read all the guides. Built my own. Buried most of them. Here’s what I found: Most respectable AI Rules Files are technically brilliant. Almost all of them are missing something critical: beginner-friendly product thinking. How And Why This System Works Best practices: It preserves the best of the existing ‘rules for AI’ best practices, with a few additions tailored for beginner-friendly product thinking. Environment-aware: it generates the right file for your actual setup - replit.md, cursor.mdc, whatever you’re using. Teaching built in: every rule explains why it exists in simple language. You learn conventions in context, not from a textbook. Product thinking and ripple-effect awareness: it shows the downstream consequences beginners without product-thinking experience usually miss: If you add a trial period ➜ your billing logic + onboarding flow change If you add notifications ➜ you’ll need scheduling + retries + preferences If you add user-generated content ➜ you’ll need moderation flows + abuse checks It also forces a clean Build Now vs. Build Later split so you don’t ship products that look like my Substack drafts folder: 37 features started, none finished. For Agents And For Humans: You’ll notice the prompt is written in plain language, not JSON. That’s intentional - it outputs a critical project file so I want to keep it bilingual, readable by both humans and agents.

Before running the prompt, make sure you’ve read this👇. How To Use The Agent Rules Builder Prompt This prompt is a full system on its own, so I’m giving it a dedicated page. You can grab it here. What To Do With The Generated Rules File How you set up and manage your rules file depends on which tool you use. See the overview here. The Habit That Keeps Your AI Rules File From Rotting Agent files aren’t static, they grow with your project. This workflow gives you a rock-solid starting framework, but the real power comes from how you evolve it. As your projects get deeper, you’ll find yourself adding new instructions, commands, and shortcuts so you don’t have to retype the same prompts over and over. If you’re using things like a deep-error-fixing prompt, debugging rituals, or design files, bake them right into the file. None of this needs to be perfect on day one, the file will mature alongside your projects.