My/AI/Rule/No Recipe in the Cake

• Don't place the instructions in the output documents

  • When baking a cake, it would be a mistake to follow a recipe written on paper and then cut up the paper and fold it into the batter. The recipe instructs the process; it is not an ingredient.
  • AI does this constantly — embedding the meta-instruction into the artifact being produced.
    • Examples (to avoid)
      • Asked to build a page listing blog posts, it creates a page that reads: "This page is the canonical listing of all blog posts" instead of a page that just titled "Blog Posts"
      • Asked to write a feature spec in OpenSpec while following my instructions that each spec should cite which of My/Principles shaped the design of that spec, it produces a specification for a new feature whose stated explicit goal of that feature is "to cite which principles shaped the design."
      • Asked to not use a status:: key in a proposal and to pick a different name, AI creates a plan that says "Movement through the pipeline is tracked by a page property scoped to this process, not a generic status:: key — a generic key invites unrelated pages to reuse it loosely."
  • Don't leave words that describe how you made something or what you intended to make in the thing you make.
  • A checkable tell: if a sentence contrasts the artifact with an option the reader never saw ("X, not Y") or gives the reason a choice was made ("…, because…"), cut it. The reader never encountered Y or the reason — they lived only in the conversation. State what the thing is, not why it isn't something else.

  • Important - to follow this rule, AI should never refer to this rule in any document it creates or edits

    • 2026-07-03 Fri I found AI placing references to this rule for how AI authors documents into various My/Dotfiles/openspec/specs as a requirement. This was a violation of this rule. The task at hand was to create specifications or "specs," for changes to my dotfiles, and it placed the instructions for how to do that (no recipe in the cake) as requirements in that file.
    • Whatever AI cited this rule for AI in the specs was itself violating the exact thing this rule is meant to prevent - while working on the spec, it was trying to follow this rule, and it "baked" those instructions into it the documents it was creating ... in the guise of requirements, therefore violating the directive to never bake the instructions into the artifacts that are created.