One file, every agent reads it — that's the whole trick

I just watched the Jake Van Cleef breakdown, and the biggest thing that stood out to me was the single-source-of-truth setup — one claude md and agend md file per project folder/sub-folder. It clicked because I'd already built something close to this in my own Obsidian vault without realizing it had a name — a root file with the rules, and folder-level files underneath it.

My main takeaway was the back-routing rule: if the answer isn't in the file you're in, go back up to the parent instead of wandering the whole workspace. The experiment at the end, and watching the agent hop file to file just from reading instructions with no extra prompt, helped me understand why that back-routing rule matters. It keeps the agent from burning time searching once you scale past a couple of folders.

Going forward, I'm going to prove out true cross-app portability, pointing my vault's root instruction file at a different agent (not just the one I built it with) and confirming it reads the same map and behaves the same way, instead of assuming the file alone is enough.

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One file, every agent reads it — that's the whole trick