What is personal operating procedures?

Personal operating procedures is a concept in personal epistemology: Written agent descriptions can be reviewed refined and shared.

Example: You have a morning routine agent: when the alarm goes off, you make coffee, check your calendar, and plan your top three priorities. This agent has run reliably for two years — but it lives entirely in your head. One stressful week, you skip the planning step. Then you skip it again. Within a month, the agent has silently degraded and you don't notice until you're regularly arriving at work reactive instead of prepared. Had you written it down — trigger, conditions, actions — the degradation would be visible in the gap between the document and your behavior.

This concept is part of Phase 21 (Agent Fundamentals) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent fundamentals.