The 10 principles contain dozens of actionable items. This checklist regroups them by how much effort they require, so you can start improving your workflows today and build toward infrastructure changes over the coming weeks. Each item links to its source principle for the full rationale and research backing.

Day 1 — Zero-Cost Habit Changes

These cost nothing. No tooling, no configuration, no approval. Just change how you prompt.

  • Run /clear between every distinct unit of work (P2)
  • Front-load critical information in prompts — constraints and identity first, details after (P2)
  • Start every task with a plan file, even small ones (P4)
  • When correcting the agent, add the rule to CLAUDE.md with a BECAUSE clause (P5)

Week 1 — Small Tooling

These require an hour or two of setup but no infrastructure changes.

  • Add last-verified frontmatter to convention docs (P3)
  • Map every LLM step in your most-used workflow as fuzzy or deterministic (P1)
  • Add structured JSON logging to tool calls (P7)
  • Build one specialist reviewer for your weakest review domain (P6)
  • Identify the 2–3 irreversible decisions in your workflow for human gates (P8)

Weeks 2–4 — Infrastructure

These require planning, coordination, or tooling investment.

  • Create a weekly CI job for doc freshness checks (P3)
  • Harden your most failure-prone deterministic step (P1)
  • Add human gates at plan finalization and pre-deploy (P8)
  • Instrument token spend per workflow step (P9)
  • Create a jig profile for your primary project (P10)

  • Run your next multi-agent task with a single agent first as baseline (P9)

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