Content Intelligence

Rules that go beyond structural validation to analyze the quality of instruction files. Built on attention research (lost-in-the-middle, instruction-following limits) and prompt engineering best practices. See the research page for the full research basis behind each rule.

Rule ID	Description	Default Severity	Autofix
content-weak-language	Detect hedging, vague, and non-actionable language in instruction files	info (auto)	-
content-tautological	Detect tautological instructions that the model already follows by default	info (auto)	-
content-description-routing	Skill and agent descriptions should guide routing; command descriptions should clearly explain their purpose	warning (auto)	-
content-redundant-with-tooling	Detect instructions that duplicate .editorconfig, ESLint, Prettier, or tsconfig settings	warning (auto)	-
content-instruction-budget	Check if instruction count in a file exceeds LLM instruction budget (~150)	warning (auto)	-
content-negative-only	Detect prohibitions without a positive alternative (agent has no path forward)	info (auto)	-
content-section-length	Warn about markdown sections longer than ~500 tokens	info (auto)	-
content-contradiction	Detect likely contradictions within instruction files using keyword-pair heuristics	warning (auto)	-
content-hook-candidate	Detect instructions that should be automated as hooks instead of prose instructions	info (auto)	-
content-cognitive-chunks	Check that instruction files are organized into cognitive chunks with headings	info (auto)	-
content-embedded-secrets	Detect potential API keys, tokens, and passwords in instruction files	error (auto)	-
content-banned-references	Detect banned or deprecated model names, APIs, and custom patterns	warning (auto)	-
content-inconsistent-terminology	Detect inconsistent terminology across instruction files (e.g., mixing 'directory' and 'folder')	info (auto)	-
content-instruction-drift	Detect near-duplicate sections that have drifted apart across instruction files	info (auto)	-
content-broken-internal-reference	Detect markdown links where the target file does not exist	warning (auto)	auto
content-unlinked-internal-reference	Detect bare path-like strings not wrapped in markdown link syntax	info (auto)	auto
content-placeholder-text	Detect TODO markers, bracket placeholders, and unfilled template text	warning (auto)	-
content-unclosed-fence	Detect code fences opened but never closed, hiding the rest of the file from content rules	warning (auto)	auto
content-repeated-directive	Detect the same directive stated more than once within a file	warning (auto)	-
content-emphasis-density	Detect emphasis inflation: too many ALWAYS/NEVER/MUST/IMPORTANT directives per file	warning (auto)	-
content-missing-stop-condition	Detect open-ended loop instructions (keep monitoring, poll, retry) without a stopping condition	warning (disabled)	-