# Standards — AGENTS.md The home of my agent-operating standards **and** the live global fleet that serves them. This repo is both the documentation of how any coding agent works in my repos and the actual source of the global agents, commands, and `how-i-work.md` that every project inherits. Edit here and every repo on this machine feels it. For a human-facing tour of the four standards documents, read `README.md` — this file is the agent-facing orientation and does not restate it. > **Inbox check (this repo):** At session start, if `INBOX.md` has unchecked items tagged > `(standards)`, surface them before proposing next steps; triage with `/triage`. ## What this repo is the source of The global layer lives here and is wired into `~/.claude` by **directory symlinks**, so a file added under `adapters/` is live immediately — no per-file linking: - `~/.claude/commands` → `adapters/claude/commands/` — global slash commands (`/retrofit`, `/handoff`, `/full-eval`, `/capture`, `/triage`, `/roundup`, `/new-project`). - `~/.claude/agents` → `adapters/claude/agents/` — global subagents (reviewer, evaluator, security-auditor, doc-auditor, exerciser, researcher, janitor, portability-checker, start9-spec-checker). - `~/.claude/CLAUDE.md` → `how-i-work.md` — my universal preferences, loaded every session. (Distinct from this repo's *root* `CLAUDE.md`, which → `AGENTS.md`: same filename, different scopes — global preferences vs. this repo's orientation.) - `~/.claude/statusline.sh` → `adapters/claude/statusline.sh` — the Claude Code CLI terminal status-line script (invoked by `~/.claude/settings.json`). Because these are *global*, decisions here are never scoped to this repo alone. The test for anything proposed ("should we adopt linters / hooks / CI?", "is this skill worth building?") is **whether it's generally best-in-class across all the repos I build** — this repo is just where that cross-repo standard is authored and stored. ## Layout - `README.md` — human index of the four standards docs. - `how-i-work.md` — universal preferences (served as `~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`). - `portability.md` — the vendor-neutral / hot-swap protocol. - `retrofit-playbook.md` — terminal runbook for moving a project's brain onto disk. - `subagents-handbook.md` — designing and running delegated agents. - `guides/` — **neutral substance**: the self-contained operating guide for each command and agent, written as plain prose any vendor's harness could follow. Also holds shared reference docs that aren't tied to one command — e.g. `placement.md` (where a new project should live), which `/new-project` and `how-i-work.md` both point at. - `adapters/claude/{commands,agents}/` — **thin Claude wrappers**: frontmatter + a pointer to the matching `guides/` file. Substance never lives in a wrapper. - `INBOX.md` — cross-project capture buffer for untriaged ideas/bugs (see below). - `ROADMAP.md` — longer-term backlog for this repo (future agents, commands, standards). - `STATUS.md` — latest cross-project roundup snapshot, overwritten + committed by `/roundup` each run (git history is the diff over time). ## Conventions when editing - **Substance in `guides/`, machinery in `adapters/`.** To add or change what a command/agent *does*, edit its `guides/.md`. The wrapper only carries frontmatter and the "read your guide, then follow it exactly; if you can't read it, stop — don't improvise" pointer. Match the existing wrappers exactly. - **Portability first.** Knowledge lives in vendor-neutral files; vendor-named paths are relative symlinks into them. Full protocol in `portability.md`; the `portability-checker` agent verifies it. - **Keep this file lean.** Whole-repo, every-session facts only. Subsystem detail goes in a guide. Near-term status goes in `## Current state` below; longer-term backlog in `ROADMAP.md`. - Follow `how-i-work.md` for collaboration, git, and debugging defaults. ## The capture → triage → roadmap loop A frictionless path from "random thought about some repo" to "on the right list," so ideas stop scattering into phone notes: - **`/capture`** appends one structured line to `INBOX.md` from *any* repo (you need not be in the target repo) and commits+pushes the standards repo so the note is durable. Capture is deliberately dumb and uniform — no routing decision at capture time. - **`/triage`**, run *inside* a project, drains that project's `INBOX.md` items and routes each — `Current state`, the repo's `ROADMAP.md`, a guide, or discard — with your approval, then clears them from the inbox. - **Inbox is upstream of every repo's ROADMAP.** ROADMAP is triaged, owned backlog for one repo; the inbox is the raw, cross-project buffer that feeds the ROADMAPs. **Inbox-check line (the portable surfacing mechanism).** Every project repo's `AGENTS.md` should carry this so any vendor's agent surfaces pending items at session start: > **Inbox check:** At session start, if `~/Projects/standards/INBOX.md` exists, scan it for > items tagged `(this-repo)` and surface them before proposing next steps; triage with > `/triage`. ## Current state - **The fleet is built and live.** Commands `/capture`, `/triage`, `/roundup`, `/new-project`, `/handoff`, `/retrofit`, `/full-eval` (substance in `guides/`, thin wrappers in `adapters/claude/`, symlinked into `~/.claude`). The repo dogfoods its own standard: inbox-check line, deny-by-default `.gitignore`, relative symlinks, capture→triage→roadmap loop. - `/roundup` writes a tracked `STATUS.md` snapshot each run (overwritten, committed + pushed — diffable over time); latest snapshot dated 2026-06-14. - `/new-project` is the inverse of `/retrofit`: workshops a captured `(new)` idea into a standards-compliant repo and publishes to Gitea via a manual-create gate; the stack quality gate is deferred to a future `/harden`. Now carries a **form-factor gate** (is this even a standalone repo, or a feature/skill/agent of something that exists? — bail + reroute if so), a **worth-building gate** at sign-off (build effort + ongoing tax → BUILD/PARK/ADOPT), a **placement** step that walks `guides/placement.md`, the falsifiable-exit "substance rule," and a posture section — all harvested from a retired `idea-workshop` skill. A new project's architectural decisions live in its `AGENTS.md` `## Decisions` section (no separate ADR file). - `guides/placement.md` is a new shared reference (where a project should run / which model / what data layer), ported from that skill. **Its infra facts are UNVERIFIED** — generated one-shot from chat history — and need a review pass with me (ROADMAP item 7); the file and `how-i-work.md` both flag this. - **The upgraded `/new-project` flow has had its first live end-to-end run** — scaffolded `~/Projects/matrix-bridge` (a Matrix→Claude Code bridge bot) from a prior scoping package, folding its SPEC/DECISIONS into the new AGENTS.md `## Decisions` scheme. The form-factor gate (worthy of its own repo) and the placement step worked cleanly in practice; portability-checker passed. Good worked example of the flow. - Cross-repo git-hygiene audit done: 9 repos audited, no leaks, 6 remediated + pushed; the canonical `.claude/` block is now **deny-by-default** (in `portability.md`; full detail in git log + ROADMAP item 6). - Last session: corrected a stale repo name (`Workout-log` → `proof-of-work`) across `STATUS.md`/`ROADMAP.md` after a reviewer pass, and deleted the dead non-git `Workout-log` folder (crash logs only). Nothing in progress — committed and pushed; tree clean. - **Next steps:** (1) verify & correct `guides/placement.md`'s infra facts with me (ROADMAP item 7 — cheap, unblocks trustworthy placement in `/new-project`); (2) the cross-repo quality-gate standard + `/harden` (ROADMAP item 1 — also unblocks `/new-project`'s deferred quality-gate step); (3) the non-git-folder sweep under `~/Projects` (item-6 residual; `Workout-log` cleared, count now ~14). - Queued elsewhere / specced-not-built: the `ten31-transcripts` mini-retrofit waits in `INBOX.md` for that repo's `/triage`; the SessionStart hook (item 3) and inbox-line bootstrap threading (item 4) remain on the ROADMAP.