14 Connect standards knowledge and decisions

A standards document can contain valuable guidance and still be difficult to use at the moment it matters. An agent may receive too much irrelevant material, miss the rule that changes its decision, or apply a specialized workflow to an ordinary repair.

Puma's Coding-Standards work treats this as an interface and information-model problem. The standards are not merely a collection of agent skills. They include relationships, policy identities, routing, and qualification mechanisms intended to make relevant guidance usable by agents.

The distinction matters because publishing a paragraph and making it discoverable are different changes.

Route by the decision being made

A request with material uncertainty about the intended behavior may need discovery even if the eventual patch is small. A request to investigate a known technical behavior may need a bounded research path without reopening product design. A clear low-impact repair may need neither a long plan nor a complex coordination protocol.

Routing should distinguish these situations through facts relevant to the decision. It should not rely only on labels such as small, complex, or multiple agents. Those labels can correlate with a need without defining it.

For example, concurrent research does not necessarily create competing edits to shared authority. Several agents can investigate independently while one person integrates the findings. A stale-proposal protocol becomes relevant when independently prepared changes may be applied against a state that has changed. Participant count alone does not establish that risk.

A relationship graph is still a model

A graph can connect a topic, policy, workflow, consumer, and evidence record. Those edges make useful questions possible: what guidance applies here, which consumers could be affected by this revision, and what qualification supports it?

The graph does not discover all real relationships automatically. A declared consumer may be missing. A relationship may be stale. A route may be too broad. The implementation should make these possibilities inspectable rather than present the graph as complete because it is machine-readable.

The inspected discovery publication includes policy scopes and consumer relationships as well as prose. That supports a claim that the procedure is registered, not a claim that every agent selects it correctly or that all downstream behavior has been verified. This distinction becomes important when evaluating any executable standards system. Registered policy scopes, declared consumer relationships.

Provide the right amount of context

More instructions can increase cost and distraction. Less context can omit a crucial constraint. The design problem is relevance, not a universal preference for long or short prompts.

The inspected AGENTS.md study compared repository context arrangements across issue-solving tasks. Generated context increased average inference cost, while average success differences from no context were not statistically significant. Developer-written files did better than generated ones but did not show a significant average gain over no file. The tested settings do not establish the value of Puma's scoped engine; they are a useful counterweight to assuming that added instructions must help. Evaluating AGENTS.md.

A practical standards interface should let the agent discover relevant guidance and inspect supporting detail when needed. It should also make omissions visible enough to correct. A small catalog that routes to the wrong rule is not an improvement merely because it uses fewer tokens.

Distinguish application from qualification

A rule can be available, selected, understood, applied, and effective. Those are separate claims.

A route test may show that a given fact pattern selects Planning. A structural check may show that a policy has a valid identity. A conversation review may show that an agent explained a consequence. An outcome observation may show that the resulting product fit the user's intent. No single check substitutes for all the others.

This is where standards work can become overbuilt. If every relationship needs elaborate proof before any ordinary change can proceed, the infrastructure may obstruct its own purpose. The system should preserve the distinctions that matter without turning all uncertainty into a blocking state.

Exercise the guidance as an interface

Take three tasks: a small clear repair, a small ambiguous request, and a larger but well-understood implementation. For each, predict which guidance should apply and why. Then observe the actual route and the agent's use of the result.

If the route is wrong, identify the missing or misleading fact. If the route is correct but the agent misuses the rule, inspect presentation and examples. If the rule is followed but the outcome is poor, revise the rule or its applicability rather than celebrating compliance.

The standards should help people and agents make better decisions. Their own design therefore needs the same outcome-based scrutiny as the software they govern.