dont-forget — The Agent Picks the Enforcement, You Approve Before It Ships

I asked the agent to increment the deploy counter on every production deploy. It agreed. It even added a user rule. Next session, deploy-count.json was still at zero.

That was not the first time. I am asking agents to remember more and more — DER updates, E2E before “done”, OpenAPI client sync — and the pattern is always the same: yes in chat, nothing in the repo.

I am not trying to fix agent memory. I am trying to stop relying on it.

What I actually want

When I say always, every deploy, never forget, I do not want another paragraph in AGENTS.md. I want the agent to look at the obligation, pick a trigger (commit, deploy, PR, schedule), decide what executable gate fits this codebase — workflow step, hook, test that fails, codegen diff — and show me the plan before editing anything.

I approve (or adjust). Then it implements. One line in AGENTS.md points at the automation. Future sessions discover it from files, not from chat history.

That is the heart of dont-forget: not “remember better,” but propose enforcement, get approval, commit machinery.

flowchart LR
  A[Obligation] --> B[Trigger]
  B --> C[Pick mechanism]
  C --> D[Propose to user]
  D --> E[User approves]
  E --> F[Implement and verify]
  F --> G[AGENTS doc pointer]

This is not “AI safety guardrails” (blocking bad outputs). It is enforcement — software that checks whether something important actually happened.

Deploy counter — how the proposal should look

Same request: increment counter every deploy, agent forgot before.

Wrong: user rule “remember to bump deploy-count.json.”

Right: before any file edit, something like:

Obligation: deploy-count.json increments on every successful production deploy.
Trigger: .github/workflows/deploy.yml, after health check passes.
Mechanism: workflow step runs scripts/increment-deploy-count.sh.
Files: workflow, script, counter file.
If skipped: deploy job fails (prefer this over a silent stale counter).
AGENTS.md: Deploy count: see .github/workflows/deploy.yml

Approve to implement?

After approval: add the step, run it once, confirm failure when skipped. Done. No “I’ll remember next time.”

The skill includes an enforcement ladder (CI and deploy pipelines beat prose rules) so the agent has a ranked menu — but the choice is contextual. A hook might beat CI for pre-commit checks; codegen might beat both for OpenAPI drift. The agent decides; I confirm.

When it does not apply

One-off work in this session. Judgment calls with no objective pass/fail. Tasks where automation costs more than a once-a-year manual step. When I explicitly want a manual checklist only.

Install

npx skills add farukzahra/agent-skills --skill dont-forget

Global (all projects):

npx skills add farukzahra/agent-skills --skill dont-forget -g -a cursor -y

Source: github.com/farukzahra/agent-skills — skills/dont-forget/.

If you have repeated the same instruction twice and nothing stuck — do not write another reminder. Ask the agent what to enforce, read the proposal, and let the repo remember for you.