Templates & Prompts

Reusable artifacts that operationalise the Human-First Engineering framework. Each file is a starting point — adapt it to your project’s conventions.

📄 Instruction files

Drop-in files that shape how AI assistants behave in your codebase. They encode Pillar 4’s “Encode team context in instruction files” behaviour.

  • copilot-instructions.md — for GitHub Copilot. Place at .github/copilot-instructions.md in your repository.
  • CLAUDE.md — for Claude Code and the Claude API. Place at the root of your repository.

Both encode the same principles; use whichever matches your tooling, or both.

💬 Prompts

Short, reusable prompts for specific moments in the framework. Save them to a shared prompt library your team can pull from.

  • prompts/problem-frame.md — Pillar 1 — Think first. Use at the start of non-trivial work to force a clear problem frame before any code is generated.
  • prompts/review-assistant.md — Pillar 2 — Own the output. Helps a reviewer probe reasoning, not just syntax, when reviewing AI-assisted code.
  • prompts/risk-assessment.md — Pillar 5 — Trust AI, but verify everything. Categorises a change as low, medium, or high risk and recommends a verification level.

🛠️ How to use these

  1. Copy, don’t depend. These are starting points. Adapt them to your project’s language, conventions, and context. A template you cannot explain is no better than AI-generated code you cannot explain.
  2. Keep them short. If your instruction file grows past a page, signal is diluting. Split by concern or remove what is not pulling its weight.
  3. Version them. Instruction files are code. Review changes. Track what improved or regressed.
  4. Own them. Every file here should have a named human owner on your team. That is Pillar 2 applied to the AI layer itself.

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