Quoting Geoffrey Huntley

Simon Willison posted a quotation from Geoffrey Huntley on 13 October 2026, and the idea is blunt in the best way. If an agent keeps reaching around a diagnostics library, Huntley says you can try to update AGENTS.md. But there’s still drift. The instructions and the code will slowly stop matching, and the gap will grow.

So he takes a more aggressive route: a pre-commit hook that inspects the git diff for direct calls to observability modules that bypass his diagnostics module. If it finds them, the commit fails. The hook also injects a prompt telling the agent to use the diagnostics library instead. No negotiation. No “please remember this next time.”

That turns a soft policy into something the tooling can actually enforce. Huntley’s punchline is that it makes the setup “ten out of ten.” The quote ends with a familiar complaint dressed up as a joke: nobody should type code by hand anymore. Here’s what’s left.

Willison tags the post with git, ai, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, Geoffrey Huntley, and agentic-engineering, which is a pretty good map of the moment. The work is no longer just writing code. It’s writing the rails that keep the code, and the agents making it, from wandering off.