AGENTS.md

Project Context Records (PCR)

This project follows Project Context Records (PCR) — methodology: https://github.com/hyfdev/project-context-records. PCR keeps the project's durable judgment — the why, the decisions, the intent — so you inherit it instead of re-deriving or re-litigating what's already settled.

When working here:

• Where records live. Records are in .agents/docs/, one topic per file, cross-linked with relative Markdown links.
  • A README.md there is the map: it routes code areas or hotspots to the exact record or heading, one-line gist per route. Create it when retrieval stops being a glance or one record grows into a long ledger.
• Read first. Start from the map if present, else scan the folder. Open the records or headings that cover an area before changing or answering for it; if the area has a decision ledger, read it first.
• Use the strongest durable form. Machine-checkable constraints go in types, tests, lints, or CI; rules that must bind every session go in the agent-instructions file, outside the markers; single-spot rationale goes beside the code with a link; records carry the cross-cutting judgment, intent, and context that must stay prose.
• Record as you go. Capture context when a decision lands, a trap costs you, a human corrects you, or a human asks — anything true about this project, not durable in a stronger form, and useful beyond the moment.
  • Report what you record so a human can review or vouch it.
  • Records are as public as the repo: keep secrets out, and ask before recording rationale from private context.
• Write to be acted on. Lead with the current conclusion and where it applies; capture the why — trade-offs, alternatives rejected, known pitfalls. Keep each topic's current truth in one fresh place, updated in place: evolution belongs to git, never to supersede chains.
• Keep it fresh. Update affected records in the same change that touches their subject.
  • When code and a record disagree, decide which side went stale and fix that side.
  • Back facts with durable evidence — tests, reproducible commands, committed artifacts, stable URLs, commit hashes — not ephemeral paths or one session's output.
• Provenance. Unstamped text is AI-accumulated: challenge and verify it freely. [VOUCHED @handle YYYY-MM-DD] means the named human explicitly accepted the covered words as current project direction.
  • A vouch is direction, not proof: facts keep needing durable evidence. Don't reopen vouched direction for its own sake — only on new evidence, a changed constraint, or the human's say-so.
  • When evidence argues with vouched direction, record the conflict and surface it to a human; stay inside the direction unless progress becomes impossible. Silence is not an option.
  • Scope: at a non-heading line's end, the stamp covers that line; alone on the first nonblank line below a heading, that section until the next heading of the same or higher level; alone below the document title, the whole file. Never in heading text — link anchors derive from headings.
  • Add a stamp only on explicit instruction. A stamp added by work under review counts only once the named human confirms it; an unchanged stamp on the target branch is inherited project state.
  • The stamp binds the exact covered words. Any edit that changes them — or changes which words the scope covers — removes the stamp until the human re-vouches; a change that leaves the covered words identical keeps it.
  • Legacy stamp forms (undated, before the title, inside a heading) stay valid with their original scope; never move, re-date, or reinterpret one without the human's approval.
• Decision ledgers. When the human declares that an area records decisions, keep that area's judgments in <area>-decisions.md and register new judgments there.
  • Placement: beside the area's derived document (DESIGN-decisions.md beside DESIGN.md, typically both in the records folder); with no derived document, in the records folder — a map route either way.
  • You may propose opening a ledger; only the human opens one.
  • The register contract, stated at the top of the file: only judgments the human actually expressed enter — a finished implementation, a passed review, resemblance to a reference, or silence is not acceptance. Never invent a rationale: if no reason was given, the entry says so.
  • Record the act of judgment, not the chosen thing's full content — exhaustive detail lives in the area's own document, linked. Edit entries in place; git keeps history.
  • Entries sit under Decided or Open. An Open entry marks a known-undecided question — current behavior is not a choice — with any stopgap and what would settle it. A Decided entry carries:
    • a short stable topic heading — map routes and stamp scopes anchor to it;
    • Ruling: one plain sentence, its force in its own wording — must / never / prefer / default to; no status field;
    • Limits: what it does not govern, what may change without reopening it, what would reopen it — a stopgap is a ruling plus its reopen condition;
    • Why: premises, alternatives compared, rejections — exactly as the human gave them;
    • Source: who expressed it, when, a durable pointer; for "accept the reviewed thing as a whole", pin the thing (commit hash, spec section) instead of transcribing it;
    • the vouch stamp, once the human vouches the entry, alone under the entry's heading — covering the whole entry.
• Distill when a human reviews. Accumulation is noisy by design; the valve is a human pass, and you draft it.
  • Propose: prune what is contradicted or dead, merge near-duplicates, promote buried context, fix map drift. Unattended, apply this to your own unstamped layer as you go — never the vouched one.
  • Flag: unstamped direction that has become load-bearing, factual claims whose evidence no longer holds, vouches plausibly affected by changes to what they cover.
  • The human decides and vouches.
• Suggested topics. Draft the missing ones that apply; when an existing doc already covers a topic, enroll it — a map route pointing at it where it lives, held to these same rules — instead of drafting a twin:
  • intent.md — what this is trying to be, for whom, and the non-goals; enroll the README instead if it truly covers them.
  • technology-stack.md — why tools, restrictions, and pins exist; not a manifest dump.
  • architecture.md — units, boundaries, and why the lines are where they are; when structure isn't glanceable.
  • gotchas.md — traps already paid for, each with its why; only real paid lessons.
  • DESIGN.md — only for a visual surface; follow https://github.com/google-labs-code/design.md (records folder by default — the spec fixes no location), enroll it in the map, and suggest wiring its linter into the project's own checks with the file's actual path (e.g. npx @google/design.md lint .agents/docs/DESIGN.md; platform variants in the spec).
  • loop-goal.md — only for an unattended run: the run's contract — goal, boundaries, finish criteria. You may draft it; the run starts only once the human has vouched the whole file (stamp below the title), and a human edit plus re-vouch re-baselines it. Never edit it yourself; if the contract itself blocks progress, stop and surface the conflict rather than stepping outside it.
  • loop-status.md — only for an unattended run: the run's memory — done, in flight, next, blocked — overwritten in place each iteration; its final overwrite is the handover to the returning human (what landed, what to vouch, what to prune, conflicts included). Both loop-* files die after the human's distillation pass over that handover; git keeps them.

Main branch commits and pull requests

• Every commit retained on main must follow Conventional Commits 1.0.0.
• Pull requests targeting main must use squash merge. The pull request title must be the Conventional Commit subject that lands on main.
• Topic-branch commits do not need to follow Conventional Commits individually when the pull request will be squashed.
• Keep the repository settings, pull request title check, and contributor documentation aligned with these rules.