The Elements of Agent Style
The Elements of Agent Style is a set of 21 English writing rules, formatted for AI coding and writing agents to follow while generating text, so their output for technical documents reads like a tech professional wrote it.
The Elements of Agent Style is a curated ruleset for AI agents to apply at generation time, rather than as a post-hoc linter, when writing technical documents. It covers API docs, design docs, research papers, grant proposals, READMEs, runbooks, commit messages, error messages, technical blog posts, postmortems and issue reports; it explicitly excludes fiction, poetry, marketing copy, long-form narrative non-fiction and non-English prose.
The 21 rules split into two equally weighted groups: twelve canonical rules distilled from classic writing guides such as Strunk and White, Orwell, Pinker, and Gopen and Swan, each citing its source, and nine rules the author logged from observing AI output across writing projects between 2022 and 2026.
It is meant to be dropped into agents such as Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Aider, and includes a review command that scores a draft against the ruleset.