Write for readers

Make the intended reader able to form the right mental model and take the intended next step quickly. Optimize for the reader's time to understanding, not for completeness of the writer's narration.

Establish the reader and job

Before writing, establish who the reader is, what they already know, what they need to understand, decide, or do, and how much explanation that requires.

For an agent reader, also establish the behavior to produce, the concrete failure to prevent, the authority and scope of the instruction, and the mechanisms the agent can actually invoke.

When writing from another agent's work, distinguish sharply between information available to the upstream agent and information available to the reader. Never assume the reader witnessed the research, implementation, debugging, tool use, rejected alternatives, or intermediate reasoning.