standards/AGENTS.md

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, /design).
• ~/.claude/agents → adapters/claude/agents/ — global subagents (reviewer, evaluator, security-auditor, doc-auditor, exerciser, researcher, janitor, portability-checker, start9-spec-checker, design-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/<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 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 2026-06-16.
• Design system built (2026-06-16, ROADMAP item 8). /design (main-thread command) runs the inspiration-first design round-trip → a vendor-neutral on-disk contract (design/DESIGN.md nine-section brief + design/tokens.tokens.json DTCG tokens); design-checker (read-only subagent) audits a repo's UI against its own contract. Claude Design (cloud-only/experimental) is the interchangeable front-end, never a dependency — its export is inline-hardcoded HTML/CSS, so Phase-C token distillation is agent-mediated (research-verified 2026-06-16). /new-project now scaffolds design/ for user-facing projects.
• /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 shared reference (where a project should run / which model / what data layer). Its infra facts were verified with me 2026-06-15 (ROADMAP item 7 done): x86 StartOS 0.4.0 box + full service list; the two-Spark role split (LLM vs audio/speech, Qdrant on the audio Spark, matrix-bridge hosted there); route via the Spark Control gateway and query the active model rather than hardcoding one; LAN/WireGuard/StartTunnel networking. UNVERIFIED banner dropped.
• 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).
• This session: ran /roundup (STATUS.md snapshot 2026-06-15); verified & corrected guides/placement.md with me and committed it (ROADMAP item 7 done); captured a (ten31-database) networking-doc fix to INBOX.md; and resolved the how-i-work.md consolidation — promoted the instruction-file-structure convention and added a promote-without-trim principle (commit f7e9e29), and decided against any fleet-wide trimming (per-repo AGENTS.md files aren't bloated, and in-repo copies aid self-containment).
• Next steps: (1) the cross-repo quality-gate standard + /harden (ROADMAP item 1 — also unblocks /new-project's deferred quality-gate step); (2) the non-git-folder sweep under ~/Projects (item-6 residual; count ~13); (3) first live /design run + design-checker backfill on a user-facing repo, which will also confirm what Claude Design's export actually contains and let us tune Phase-C distillation (ROADMAP item 8 remaining options).
• Queued elsewhere / specced-not-built: the ten31-transcripts mini-retrofit and a new (ten31-database) networking-doc fix wait in INBOX.md for those repos' /triage; the SessionStart hook (item 3) and inbox-line bootstrap threading (item 4) remain on the ROADMAP.