AGENTS.md as evidence
Your instructions file read as a record of what has gone wrong. A line naming a real command, file or past mistake shows someone was paying attention. A line like "write clean code" shows nothing at all.
This is one of the few places where how you direct an agent is written down and dated. Its history shows rules arriving after failures, and it gives a sceptic something specific to ask: what happened to make you write this line? You either have a story, or you copied it.
Say it to your agent
“Go through AGENTS.md line by line. For each one, use git log -p AGENTS.md to find the commit that added it and the mistake behind it, and tell me whether a check now holds it. Mark any line with no reason and no check for deletion. Don't add anything.”