The "audit the rules as well as the code" section is the part I'd push on hardest, because in my experience that's exactly where these efforts stall -- by the time AGENTS.md is forty rules deep, nobody remembers which incident produced rule seventeen, so nobody dares remove it. What's worked for me is tagging each rule with a one-line trailer naming the incident and date it came from ("added after an agent reimplemented locking in the in-memory adapter, 2026-03"), so an audit becomes a question you can actually answer -- has this situation recurred, or is the underlying code now structurally incapable of it -- instead of a vague fear of regressing something you can't name anymore. Costs almost nothing to write and turns rule pruning from a judgment call into something closer to a changelog review.