holocron/AGENTS.md

Working in this repo

This repo is the global AI development configuration repository — the authoritative source for agent definitions, skills, workflows, and prompts across all projects. Built as a homelab tool intended to scale to professional environments.

Structure

• plugins/ — installable plugin units; each is an apm package (apm.yml + .apm/) carrying skills, agents, hooks, MCP servers, and bundled assets; install separately via claude plugin install <name>@holocron
• providers/claude-code/ — Claude Code adapter (deployed to ~/.claude/ via install.sh)

Edit .apm/, never the flat mirror

Inside a plugin, plugins/<name>/.apm/ is the only hand-edited source for plugin content — the skills, agents, commands, instructions, extensions and hooks a host discovers. Everything in a plugin root that mirrors an .apm/ primitive, plus both plugin.json manifests, is generated:

• scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh generates the flat plugins/<name>/{skills,agents,commands,instructions,extensions}/ directories and the merged plugins/<name>/hooks/hooks.json (ADR-0017)
• apm pack generates both per-plugin manifests — plugins/<name>/.claude-plugin/plugin.json and plugins/<name>/.github/plugin/plugin.json — and two of the three root marketplace manifests: .claude-plugin/marketplace.json (apm's claude output profile) and .agents/plugins/marketplace.json (its codex profile, a differently-shaped file) (ADR-0015)
• scripts/sync-marketplace-mirror.sh generates the third, .github/plugin/marketplace.json — Copilot CLI's legacy manifest path. No apm output profile targets it: apm ships exactly two marketplace output profiles, claude and codex (documented in plugins/kyberforge/.apm/skills/apm-workflow/references/marketplace.md). The mirror is a byte-identical copy of .claude-plugin/marketplace.json, gated by the check-marketplace-mirror-sync pre-push hook. Do not expect apm pack to refresh it — that assumption is exactly the drift this pair exists to prevent

A plugin root is not wholly generated. Material that is not an .apm/ primitive is hand-authored there and no compiler touches it: README.md, docs/, bin/, sources.md, .mcp.json, plus per-plugin extras like plugins/git/config.example.json, plugins/gitea/references/ and plugins/bin/evals/. Edit those in place — they have no .apm/ source, and looking for one wastes a search. The rule is per-path, not per-directory: plugins/<name>/skills/ is generated, plugins/<name>/docs/ is not. docs/spec/architecture.md carries the same carve-out.

One qualification: "hand-authored, untouched" holds only at the plugin root. A file placed inside a mirrored directory is destroyed — sync_dir runs rm -rf "$dst" before every copy, so a README.md under plugins/<name>/hooks/ or plugins/<name>/skills/ is deleted on the next sync whether or not .apm/ has a counterpart. Put root-level plugin documentation in docs/, never in a mirrored directory.

Nothing labels a generated file as generated — plugins/kyberforge/skills/forge/SKILL.md is byte-identical to its .apm/ original, with no marker in either. Check the path before you edit. An edit to the mirror is discarded by the next sync and is reported as drift by the check-plugin-content-sync pre-push hook, which is the earliest anyone finds out. Details in docs/spec/architecture.md.

Prefer plugin skills over raw shell

This repo dogfoods its own plugins. Before shelling out to git, gitea, or lint tooling directly, check whether an installed skill already owns the operation — it usually does:

• Commits, branches, history, worktrees, remotes → git:git-commits, git:git-branches, git:git-history, git:git-worktrees, git:git-remotes
• Pre-commit hook install/config/troubleshooting → git:pc-run / git:pc-author
• Issues, PRs, labels, milestones → gitea:gitea-issues, gitea:gitea-prs, gitea:gitea-labels-milestones; also gitea:gitea-branches, gitea:gitea-files, gitea:gitea-releases, or gitea:gitea-workflow when the domain is ambiguous
• Vale prose linting → lint:vale-config / lint:vale-run
• This repo's own AGENTS.md → core:agentsmd-author / core:agentsmd-audit

Fall back to raw shell only when no skill covers it.

Setup and testing

• Install git hooks via git:pc-run, wiring all three stages — this repo's .pre-commit-config.yaml has no default_install_hook_types, so a plain install silently skips commit-msg (Conventional Commits) and pre-push (the 12-hook gate described below).
• Install the apm CLI — four pre-push hooks shell out to it: apm-marketplace-check, apm-audit-ci, apm-pack-check-clean, and check-plugin-content-sync (via scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh, which wraps apm pack). The first three are bare apm … hook entries, so without it the push dies with an unhelpful "command not found". Use kyberforge:apm-install, or curl -sSL https://aka.ms/apm-unix | sh; verify with apm --version.
• Install jq — required by scripts/check-manifests.sh and scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh, both pre-push. These at least fail loudly (Error: jq is required but not installed).
• Install the vale binary — required by the vale-audit-prefilter-skill/-agent pre-commit hooks. Their files: patterns are .apm/-scoped: ^plugins/[^/]+/\.apm/skills/[^/]+/SKILL\.md$ and ^plugins/[^/]+/\.apm/agents/[^/]+\.agent\.md$. Only the authoring source triggers them — a SKILL.md in the generated mirror matches neither pattern, so prose findings surface only when you edit the file you are supposed to be editing. Without the binary the hooks fail with a bare "command not found" and no install pointer. brew install vale (macOS), snap install vale (Linux), choco install vale (Windows), or see https://vale.sh/docs/vale-cli/installation/. No vale sync needed — the Kyberforge styles are committed under plugins/kyberforge/.apm/skills/{skill-audit,agent-audit}/assets/vale/styles/, not downloaded packages (see ADR-0014).
• vale is also a pre-push dependency, not only pre-commit. check-vale-style-sync runs six glob-coverage probes by invoking vale --config — they are the only assertions in it that catch a .vale.ini glob typo, the failure mode where every text-level check stays clean while vale lints zero files. Missing vale is therefore a hard failure there. The opt-out is CHECK_VALE_STYLE_SYNC_ALLOW_MISSING_VALE=1, and it is not SKIP=: the hook still runs and still asserts everything verifiable from file text, but the six probes do not, and its summary says so explicitly — Vale style sync check passed (text-level only, vale unavailable): … 0 glob probe(s) verified. Use it only on a machine that genuinely cannot install vale, and read that summary line as "the glob axis was not checked", not as a pass.
• Run bash tests/run-tests.sh before considering any change done — it runs every test-*.sh script in the repo plus the bats suite (--bats-only for just bats). First run auto-initializes the bats submodules; no manual git submodule update needed.
• Pushing runs 12 repo-defined pre-push hooks, not just the test suite — run-tests and check-manifests, plus generated-content drift gates (check-plugin-content-sync, check-marketplace-mirror-sync, check-vale-style-sync, check-scope-walkup-sync), apm's own gates (apm-marketplace-check, apm-audit-ci, apm-pack-check-clean), host validators (validate-plugins, validate-marketplace, both needing the claude CLI), and check-release-needed. Run pre-commit run --hook-stage pre-push --all-files locally — one command, the whole gate. That command reports 14, not 12: pre-commit's own meta hooks, check-hooks-apply and check-useless-excludes, declare no stages: and so run at every stage including this one.
• Two pre-push hooks need the network, for one shared reason: root apm.yml's marketplace.packages[] contains exactly one remote entry (mattpocock-skills, source: mattpocock/skills), and resolving it needs a git ls-remote. apm-marketplace-check resolves every entry and is always_run, so it fails with No cached refs (offline). apm-pack-check-clean (apm pack --check-versions --check-clean --dry-run) re-resolves the same entry and fails with Error: Git network timeout during ls-remote. Pinning the entry to an exact version does not remove the call — an exact pin still ls-remotes. --offline rescues neither. To push without a network, skip both using pre-commit's own mechanism: SKIP=apm-marketplace-check,apm-pack-check-clean git push. Skip those two alone — verified under unshare -rn, the other ten pre-push hooks pass offline because they are real local checks, and adding one of them to SKIP disarms it silently.
• Author commits with git:git-commits — it validates Conventional Commits (enforced at commit-msg) for you.

Key documents

Read CONTEXT.md at the start of every session in this repo.

Read these on demand:

• docs/spec/architecture.md — current directory structure, install pipeline, provider model
• docs/adr/ — architectural decisions; read before answering design questions or proposing structural changes
• docs/ai-constitution.md — full governance evidence base; read when a governance decision needs justification
• docs/research/ai-coding-factory/ai-coding-factory-principles.md — factory design rationale; read when implementing, auditing, or reviewing skills or factory structure
• docs/notes/factory-integration-decisions.md — decisions from the factory integration grill; read when making skill authoring or factory design decisions
• Governance rules are always in effect — core/instructions/governance.md (agent rules); docs/research/governance_principles/CONTROLS.md