Guardrails Beat Guidance: A Large-Scale Study of Rules, Skills, and Persistent Configuration for Coding Agents

Abstract

Random rules improve a coding agent's task performance as much as expert-curated ones (both $+13.8$pp on a discriminative subset of SWE-bench Verified), and in our data every individually beneficial rule is a negative constraint ("do not refactor unrelated code"), while every individually harmful one is a positive directive ("follow code style"). We arrive at these findings through the first large-scale controlled study of agent rule files (\texttt{CLAUDE.md}, \texttt{.cursorrules}, and the broader family of agent skills, plugin manifests, and persona definitions): we scrape 679 rule files (25{,}532 rules) from GitHub and conduct over 5{,}000 agent runs of Claude Code with Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-bench Verified. Three patterns emerge. (i) Rule polarity cleanly separates beneficial from harmful rules; we read this through the lens of potential-based reward shaping (PBRS). (ii) Performance gains are largely content-independent: random, shuffled, mismatched-domain, and unconverted-format rule files all match curated rules, pointing to a context priming mechanism. (iii) Individual rules often appear harmful in isolation yet do not visibly accumulate damage in ensemble: pass rates remain stable across rule counts from 0 to 50. These findings expose a hidden reliability risk in the rapidly growing ecosystem of community-authored rules and skills, and they yield a clear principle for safer agent configuration: constrain what agents must not do, rather than prescribing what they should.