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Adapting Someone Else's Methodology? Rewrite It and Sign It

Stop copy-pasting other people's AI rules files.

There's a whole ecosystem of shared AI methodology now: rules files, agent skills, CLAUDE.md templates, prompt libraries, workflow docs. Grabbing one is a great starting point. Leaving it verbatim — someone else's branding, someone else's attribution footer, someone else's voice — is where it goes wrong. The moment you adapt it into your workspace, you own it and you maintain it. A copy still wearing its original author's name rots, because nobody feels responsible for it.

Why a verbatim copy rots

Adopted-but-not-adapted files fall into a maintenance dead zone:

• Ownership is ambiguous. The footer credits someone outside your team. Your teammates read that as "not ours to touch," so drift accumulates and nobody fixes it.
• It doesn't fit your stack. Generic methodology references tools, conventions, and defaults you don't use. Left in, it quietly instructs your agent to do the wrong thing.
• It's a snapshot, not a living doc. The upstream original keeps evolving; your frozen copy doesn't. Over months the gap becomes silent misinformation.
• The voice clashes. A file written in someone else's idiom reads as bolted-on. Your own docs stay coherent when they sound like one team wrote them.

The mechanism: rewrite, strip, sign

Adapting is an act of authorship, not a paste. Three concrete steps:

1. Rewrite it in your own voice. Restate every rule in your team's terminology, mapped to your actual stack and workflow. If a line doesn't apply to you, cut it.
2. Strip the vendor branding and the attribution footer. Remove logos, product plugs, and "generated by / courtesy of" lines. You're not erasing credit dishonestly — you're taking responsibility for a doc you now maintain.
3. Sign it. Set yourself (or your team) as the author, with today's date. That single line converts "someone's file we found" into "our methodology, owned here."

---
title: Testing conventions
author: Platform Team
adapted-from: upstream-testing-guide (rewritten, 2026-07)
updated: 2026-07-22
---

Keeping a short adapted-from line is honest and useful — it credits the source without pretending the file is still theirs.

Owned vs. borrowed

Power moves

• Diff on adopt. When you pull in an upstream doc, read it line by line and delete anything that doesn't match your reality before it reaches your agent.
• Date every rewrite. A visible updated: date makes staleness obvious at a glance and invites the next review.
• Fold it into your review cadence. Adapted docs get audited alongside your own — see quarterly skill audits.
• Respect the license. Rewriting in your own words is fine; check the source's license before redistributing, and keep attribution where it's required.

Resources

• Agent Skills — Anthropic docs
• Memory / CLAUDE.md — Claude Code docs
• Choose an open source license — choosealicense.com
• Cursor Rules — documentation