artifact-standards

Artifact: Standards (externalized coding conventions)

A durable, project-local corpus of declarative coding conventions — “our API responses use this format” — that an agent reads as governing context. In agent-os this is the agent-os/standards/ folder: one concise Markdown file per convention, nested by domain (api/response-format.md, database/migrations.md, root-level naming-conventions.md), plus an index.yml that maps each standard to a one-sentence description so the right ones can be matched and injected without loading them all. Authored to be token-frugal — “Every word costs tokens. Keep them concise” — and to “document only unconventional patterns, not framework defaults.”

Standards are the canonical guide (feedforward control) of topic-harness-engineering: externalized project knowledge the agent consults before acting, standing in for the “we don’t do it that way here” intuition it lacks. Agent OS distinguishes them sharply from Skills — “Standards describe what conventions to follow; Skills describe how to do tasks” — and refines them over time by syncing project-refined standards back into reusable profiles (pattern-knowledge-compounding applied to conventions).

Related but distinct externalized-convention artifacts:

• artifact-constitution — Spec Kit’s gated, immutable, up-front principles; standards are advisory, injected on demand, mined from existing code.
• artifact-adr — a per-decision rationale record; a standard is a standing rule.
• artifact-solution-doc — harvested lessons re-injected as grounding; standards are authored conventions.

Produced by (backlinks)

Agent OS:

• agent-os-discover-standards — mines the codebase into new standards files (with “why” rationale).
• agent-os-index-standards — maintains the index.yml matcher over the corpus.

See Also

• agent-os-inject-standards — deploys standards into the working context (reference vs embedded snapshot).
• pattern-context-engineering — the pattern the injected standards serve.
• pattern-knowledge-compounding — the sync-to-profile loop that refines standards across projects.
• topic-harness-engineering — standards as the guide layer; how the layer thins as models improve.