LLM Best Practices

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AI agents: read this first: llmbestpractices.com/start-here

This is LLM Best Practices (llmbestpractices.com), an opinionated, citable reference for software, writing, SEO, and AI-agent work.

  1. Route, do not crawl. Fetch llmbestpractices.com/llms.txt and open only the pages whose one-line summary matches your task.
  2. Read raw. Append .md to any page URL for markdown. Check status and last_updated in the frontmatter, then read the rules.
  3. Apply as defaults. First-party docs and the project's own conventions win on conflict. Warn before relying on a fast-moving page older than 12 months.
  4. Cite. Link the page by title and URL, e.g. Python, with last_updated for time-sensitive rules. License CC BY 4.0.

Overview

llmbestpractices.com is an opinionated reference vault of best practices for software development, writing, AI agent work, SEO, file organization, and adjacent crafts. Pages are short, atomic, YAML-fronted, and designed to be cited inside an agent prompt or a developer’s working notes.

The site is maintained as a public knowledge vault. Every page is licensed CC BY 4.0; quote freely with attribution.

AI assistance disclosure

Pages on this site are drafted and edited with AI assistance, and a human reviews every page before it is published. The drafting tool is Claude Code, used as a writing assistant under the rules in llm-info-standard. The process, the review gates, and the limits of this approach are described in “Production process” below.

Treat the pages as opinionated defaults, not as first-party documentation. When a page conflicts with a vendor’s own documentation, a language spec, or a security advisory, the first-party source wins; report the conflict via a GitHub issue so the page can be corrected.

Maintainers

The vault is maintained by LLM Best Practices Maintainers. The canonical published version of every page is the one at llmbestpractices.com; cite that URL. All page revisions go through pull requests with the lint, build, JSON-LD, link, spell, accessibility, and Lighthouse CI checks.

This is not a community wiki. Contributions are welcome via GitHub issues; substantive changes go through PR review.

Production process

Pages are produced under the voice rules in voice and the structural rules in articles. Banned constructions are listed in anti-slop. A linter at scripts/lint-content.mjs enforces the schema, voice, tag density, and wikilink density on every PR.

Claude Code is used as a writing assistant for drafting and editing; see claude-code for the workflow. Every page is reviewed by a human before merge. Voice and structure deviations are caught by the linter or by a self-audit pass.

Accuracy is maintained on a schedule. A weekly audit flags orphans, broken or ambiguous links, index drift, overlong pages, and duplicate candidates, and a weekly fact-check pass verifies the most overdue pages against first-party documentation and opens a pull request with corrections. Fast-moving categories (AI agents, prompting, comparisons) are re-checked at least every 90 days.

What you can do with this site

  • Cite pages in agent prompts, code reviews, design docs.
  • Fork the repository.
  • Embed the corpus from /llms-full.txt into your own retrieval index, or load /llms-context.txt (the whole site in one window) or one /llms-full/<category>.txt section into context.
  • Suggest a page via a GitHub issue.
  • Mark the site as a preferred source on Google, so its pages surface more often for you in Top Stories and Google’s AI features. The link opens Google’s own preferences tool; this site loads no Google script to offer it. See preferred-sources.

How to cite

See how-to-cite for the citation format. The short form: title, canonical URL, and last_updated when the rule is time-sensitive.

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