Execution hygiene
ATL agents share a small set of execution defaults — habits for how to do multi-step engineering work cleanly. They used to live only in one maintainer's personal setup; now they're a core rule, so every team and every autonomous delivery worker works the same disciplined way. This page is the user side of that posture.
What's happening under the hood
The execution-hygiene rule auto-loads in every session (and into the autonomous claude -p workers the delivery-team spawns, via the same global rule reflection). It codifies three habits that make an agent's work reviewable and trustworthy — the difference between "it produced a diff" and "it produced a diff a senior engineer would sign off on."
It complements the two rules next to it rather than repeating them: the Karpathy guidelines govern thinking before coding, and branch hygiene governs the branch lifecycle. Execution hygiene is about the moment-to-moment mechanics in between.
The three habits
1. Subagent hygiene. For a broad search or a multi-file investigation, the agent spins off a subagent — one focused task each — and keeps its own context lean. The subagent returns the conclusion, not the file dumps: you get the finding, not a transcript of everything it read. This keeps the main reasoning coherent (a bloated context is its own kind of complexity).
2. Autonomous bug-fix. Hand the agent a reproducible bug, an error, or a failing test and it investigates and fixes it itself — reads the log, the stack trace, the test, forms a hypothesis, fixes, verifies — instead of bouncing it back to ask you what to do. A bug report is a goal, not a request for confirmation. The one thing it will surface is genuine ambiguity — and even then, as a diagnosis, not a "what should I do?".
3. Atomic commits. Each commit is one coherent, verified unit of work — committed as soon as that unit works, not batched with unrelated changes. Every changed line traces to a single intent, so a review (and a future git bisect) stays legible. This is commit granularity; where those commits live is branch hygiene's job.
Why it's a core rule
These are the disciplines that make ATL's autonomous delivery trustworthy: when a claude -p worker builds a backlog item unattended, it commits atomically, fixes its own test failures, and delegates cleanly — because the rule reaches it, not just an interactive session. Promoting them from one person's persona into the platform is what lets "the backlog delivers itself" mean cleanly.