AI Coding Tip 040 - Ask the AI to List Where Your Prompts and Skills Contradict Each Other

Signup Write New Story AI Coding Tip 040 - Ask the AI to List Where Your Prompts and Skills Contradict Each Other by Maxi Contieri by Maxi Contieri | @ mcsee Software Engineer Manager and Book Author at O'Reilly I’m a sr software engineer specialized in Clean Code, Design and TDD Book "Clean Code Cookbook" 500+ articles written

I’m a sr software engineer specialized in Clean Code, Design and TDD Book "Clean Code Cookbook" 500+ articles written

When your rules disagree, the AI breaks the tie.

TL;DR: Ask the AI to list where your prompts, skills, and decisions contradict each other before it invents a tie-breaker.

You work with the AI for hours, days, then weeks with the console open on fire.

You write prompts, add agents, instructions, memories, and pile up skills.

Along the way you learn the domain and take decisions.

You discover the requirements as you go as humans do.

Your AI follows each new instruction and never mentions the contradictory old ones.

Nothing in the context marks which instruction replaces which.

You never read the whole pile as a big-picture document.

So you ask for the next feature, and the AI reads two instructions that disagree.

It picks one and keeps going with total confidence.

You don't learn a domain by reading about it.

You learn it by building, being wrong, and changing your mind, like the scientific method.

Your changes of mind end up as new prompts, new skills, and new lines in your AGENTS.md file, stacked on top of the old ones.

Nothing deletes the contradicted old ones.

I asked an AI to enumerate every contradiction across my prompts, agents, and skills.

It also surprised me with decisions I had never made at all.

Two of my validator skills disagree on how long a TL;DR can be: 160 characters in one, 120 in the other.

Together they're a coin flip, and the AI flips it without telling you.

Researchers tested this in ConInstruct: Claude-4.5-Sonnet detected the conflicts with an F1 of 87.3%, and DeepSeek-R1 with 91.5%.

Yet the models rarely tell you or ask for clarification.

They are trained to please you, so they chase the reward of a happy answer.

A human colleague would stop and ask you what you meant.

Your AI keeps going and hides the doubt.

The ability to spot the conflict is already there, and you only need to ask.

Drew Breunig calls two instructions that disagree a context clash, and every long session piles up more of them.

The Claude Code docs say so themselves: when two instructions contradict each other, Claude may pick one arbitrarily.

Ranking your own rules is your job, the same way a ranked list of laws lets a lower rule yield to a higher one.

When you make the AI ask before it builds, you pull decisions out of your head before the work starts.

The audit pulls out the ones that piled up after.

Check my AGENTS.md, my skills, and this chat. Tell me if everything looks consistent. If it does, continue with the next feature.

Good prompt 👉 Use an adversarial, independent subagent for this audit. Audit only. Don't edit any file.

Don't build anything. Read AGENTS.md, every skill, and every agent definition. Read the decisions from this chat.

List every contradiction in a numbered table. Quote both conflicting instructions exactly. Name the file or message where each one lives.

Say what you'd do if both applied to one task. Rank each item by what breaks first if you guess wrong. Then list the decisions I never made explicit.

These are the places where you had to guess. Surprise me with the ones I don't remember making. Don't resolve anything.

Ask me which side wins, one item at a time. Considerations ⚠️ Not every contradiction is a mistake.

A general rule with a deliberate exception (the exception that confirms the rule) looks like a conflict on paper.

You should ask the AI to flag those separately, and you decide.

The AI can also hallucinate a contradiction that isn't there.

That's why you read both quoted lines before you change anything.

A model that helped write the context may share its blind spots, and Greptile found that models catch more defects in code written by other models than in their own.

A second model gives you a better audit for the same reason.

Some contradictions may only show up at runtime, when the AI meets a real task.

A text audit can't find those, and I don't know yet how many there are.

The audit only finds contradictions that exist in the text you load.

A conflict between your instructions and the real state of the codebase needs tests, not a prompt.

A huge pile of files may not fit in one session, so you should audit them in pairs: AGENTS.md against skills, then skills against agents.

If you skip the deciding, you've only moved the coin flip to a different place.

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-038-make-the-ai-ask-before-it-builds

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-039-write-your-own-zeroth-law

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-034-stop-hoarding-rules-in-your-agentsmd

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-005-how-to-keep-context-fresh

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-004-why-you-should-use-modular-skills

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-025-add-a-pitfallsmd-next-to-every-skillmd

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-029-assign-a-different-model-to-each-pipeline-stage

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-003-force-read-only-planning

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-019-tell-the-ai-why-not-just-what

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-021-merging-code-you-dont-understand-creates-comprehension-debt

https://hackernoon.com/ai-coding-tip-024-force-a-criteria-check-before-the-task-ends

You change your mind as you learn, and that's healthy.

You need to make the AI read all of it and list where it disagrees with itself.

The AI already sees the contradictions, so you should make it tell you.

The /doctor prompt-audit command in Claude Code checks your instruction files for outdated or conflicting content, and it proposes edits without applying them until you ask.

Any other assistant that can read your AGENTS.md files, skills, and agent definitions can run the same audit with the good prompt above.

I am a human who writes as best as possible for other humans.

I use AI proofreading tools to improve some texts.

Most AI detectors will flag this article as AI-generated. That's expected. It's a technical article. It has a rigid format and clear steps to follow.

That's exactly the pattern those tools are trained to catch. I've apparently been "writing like an AI" for decades, long before AI existed. This is a technical article, not a novel.

I welcome constructive criticism and dialogue.

I shape these insights through 30 years in the software industry, 25 years of teaching, and writing over 500 articles and a book.

This article is part of the AI Coding Tip series.

AI Coding Tip 039 - Write Your Own Zeroth Law