An engineering bot team with written rules: the chief of staff merges only reviewed, green PRs

What to install or create

The engineering bot plans, hands code to a coding agent, reviews the full diff against main, and keeps CI moving. The chief of staff merges only after review with every required check green, under a standing approval he gave once in writing; money math, auth and migrations are flagged before merge every time. Bug fixes start with a test that fails on main; PRs stay small; review is capped at two delta rounds, then scope narrows. Repeated mistakes go into the repo's AGENTS.md.

The prompt

This is a tip, not a pasteable system prompt. The author did not publish one. Follow the first-run steps.

First run

1. 1Read https://x.com/schnieds/status/2108754367037788240 (credit @schnieds).
2. 2Give each product its own engineering bot and one chief of staff above them.
3. 3Write the playbook: failing test first, small PRs, two review rounds max.
4. 4Write the merge rule once: reviewed, all checks green, high-risk changes flagged to you.
5. 5When an agent repeats a mistake, add the fix to AGENTS.md.

What to tweak

Almost every improvement started as something he had to say twice; write it where the agents will read it.

Source

Aaron Schnieder @schnieds · Original post

Not affiliated with xAI. We did not write this prompt. Third-party template terms still apply.