Agent OS: index-standards

/index-standards — maintain agent-os/standards/index.yml, the map from each standard to a one-sentence description that lets agent-os-inject-standards match relevant standards without reading every file. Seven steps: scan agent-os/standards/ (subfolders by domain; root for top-level) → load the existing index → diff (new / deleted / unchanged) → for each new file, read it and propose a one-sentence description (user-confirmed) → auto-remove stale entries → write the index alphabetized (root first) → report counts. Run it after hand-creating or deleting standards; agent-os-discover-standards runs it automatically as its last step.

This is pure context-engineering plumbing: the index is what makes the guide layer scale without blowing the context window. Rather than loading every convention every time (the failure mode of a bloated CLAUDE.md), the one-line descriptions let the injector pull only what the current task needs — “Every word costs tokens.” The matcher, not the standards, is the real innovation: it turns a pile of convention files into a retrievable, token-budgeted resource.

See Also

• agent-os-inject-standards — the consumer of index.yml; matches its descriptions against the current context.
• agent-os-discover-standards — the author of standards; calls this as its final step.
• artifact-standards — the standards corpus this indexes.
• topic-harness-engineering — why a token-budgeted matcher matters for the guide layer.