# Standards

My agent-operating standards: how context and knowledge are organized so any coding agent — Claude Code today, another tomorrow — is productive in my repos immediately, with everything it needs and nothing it doesn't.

This file is the index and the in-the-moment lookup. The depth lives in the documents below; nothing here is restated there. (`AGENTS.md` is the agent-facing counterpart — loaded every session via the `CLAUDE.md` symlink — and orients an agent *working in* this repo rather than reading about the standards.)

## The documents

- **how-i-work.md** — my universal preferences (collaboration, debugging, git). Served to Claude every session via the `~/.claude/CLAUDE.md` symlink.
- **portability.md** — the hot-swap protocol: how every layer stays vendor-neutral, and the checklist for adopting a new provider.
- **retrofit-playbook.md** — the one-time, terminal-by-terminal runbook for moving an existing project out of a single long chat onto disk.
- **subagents-handbook.md** — designing and running delegated agents.
- **guides/** — neutral substance (checklists, role knowledge). **adapters/** — vendor machinery (symlink targets for `~/.claude/commands` and `~/.claude/agents`).
- **INBOX.md** — cross-project capture buffer. `/capture` appends an idea or bug to it from any repo without acting on it; `/triage`, run inside a project, drains that project's items into its `AGENTS.md` Current state or `ROADMAP.md`. The inbox sits upstream of every repo's ROADMAP.

## Where does this instruction go?

The governing question: **would a different agent need this to work on the repo?** Yes → it's knowledge, and goes in a neutral file. No → it configures how one tool operates, and goes in that tool's execution layer.

1. **True in every repo I work in?** → `how-i-work.md` (Claude reads it via the `~/.claude/CLAUDE.md` symlink; another tool symlinks its own global file here).
2. **True for this whole repo, every session?** → the repo's `AGENTS.md` (Claude reads it via the `CLAUDE.md` symlink). Keep under ~200 lines; when it grows, push detail down to a guide.
3. **Only relevant to one subsystem or file type?** → `docs/guides/<topic>.md` with `paths:` frontmatter, symlinked from `.claude/rules/<topic>.md`, plus one index line in AGENTS.md. Claude lazy-loads it; other tools find it via the index line.
4. **A multi-step procedure run occasionally?** → a skill.
5. **A verbose, self-contained side job whose output I won't reread?** → a subagent (see subagents-handbook.md).
6. **Must happen deterministically, every time, no matter what the model decides?** → a hook (`.claude/settings.json`), not markdown. Markdown is guidance a model can interpret; a hook is a shell command the harness always runs. Advanced and Claude-specific — an execution-layer tool to reach for only when guidance-that-can-be-ignored isn't enough. Not needed to start.
7. **Discovered mid-work?** → auto memory holds it for now; promote durable facts into AGENTS.md, since auto memory is never committed or backed up.

*The tree above routes durable **guidance**. Project **state** is tracked separately: near-term status and next steps in AGENTS.md's `## Current state` section; longer-term backlog in `ROADMAP.md` at the repo root.*

## What loads when

| Layer | Loads | After `/compact` |
|---|---|---|
| `how-i-work.md` (via `~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`) | In full, every session | Re-read |
| `AGENTS.md` (via `CLAUDE.md` symlink) | In full, every session | **Re-read from disk** |
| `ROADMAP.md` | Only when you open it deliberately | n/a — never auto-loaded |
| `docs/guides/*` (via `.claude/rules/` symlinks) | Only when files matching `paths:` are opened | **Not re-injected** — promote anything chat-only into AGENTS.md before compacting |
| Skills | On invocation / relevance | n/a |
| Subagents | Isolated context window; returns a summary | n/a |
| Auto memory | Indexed each session | Local only; not portable |

## The rhythm (canonical homes elsewhere)

One session = one task. Close every session with `/handoff` (updates Current state in AGENTS.md, commits, pushes). `/compact` is for mid-task overflow only, never to extend a finished chat. Dropped or closed by accident? `claude -c` resumes the latest session in that folder. Full daily rhythm: retrofit-playbook.md, Part 5.