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).
~/.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.
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).

Conventions when editing

Substance in guides/, machinery in adapters/. To add or change what a command/agent does, edit its guides/<name>.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 capture→triage→roadmap loop is built and live: AGENTS.md (+ CLAUDE.md symlink), ROADMAP.md, INBOX.md, and the /capture + /triage commands. The repo dogfoods its own standard, including the active inbox-check line above.
/capture also handles new-project ideas ((new) / (new:name), type project); these wait for the new-repo bootstrap and are never triaged into an existing repo.
The git-tracking standard ("What git tracks") is now in portability.md, and this repo's .gitignore follows it.
/roundup is built: a cross-project status report that reads every repo's AGENTS.md/ROADMAP.md plus the inbox and groups all to-dos by priority — reads and reports only; deciding focus stays with the user.
The inbox-check line and canonical .gitignore are now threaded into the retrofit flow (playbook + /retrofit guide), so new repos inherit them — but they're not yet in other existing repos; a shallow scan shows the .claude/git setup is inconsistent across repos.
Specced in ROADMAP.md, not built: the cross-repo git-hygiene audit (item 6, HIGH), the new-project bootstrap, the cross-repo quality-gate standard, and the SessionStart hook.
Next session: (1) run the cross-repo git-hygiene audit (ROADMAP item 6, HIGH); (2) build the new-project bootstrap (item 5); (3) add /capture, /triage, /roundup to README's "The rhythm" section.

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