Agents context management

Agents Context Management

Create or polish repo-local context as one coherent system: human-facing README.md files, agent-facing AGENTS.md files with companion CLAUDE.md symlinks, and existing project-installed skills under .agents/skills.

Success means every selected target is grounded in repository evidence, respects its audience and scope, and passes the narrowest repository-defined validation. Stop after reporting completed or planned changes, validation, and any blockers.

Model Optimization

Optimize skills and other agent-facing context for GPT-5.6 and Claude Fable 5 while preserving README.md as clear human-facing documentation. The summaries below are reminders, not substitutes for the live guides. Read both guides before complex, long-running, multi-tool, or orchestration-heavy context work because their recommendations may evolve.

• GPT-5.6 prompting guidance: Prefer lean, outcome-first prompts that specify the goal, success and stopping criteria, constraints, evidence, permission boundaries, tool routing, output shape, and validation. Remove redundant scaffolding and evaluate changes on representative tasks.
• Claude Fable 5 prompting guidance: Use concise instructions that explain intent and boundaries; avoid over-prescription and scope creep; tune effort deliberately; ground progress claims in tool evidence; and make long-run verification and scaffolding explicit when needed.

Choose a Workflow

Choose exactly one workflow and read only its reference.

User intent	Workflow	Reference
Update, refresh, sync, prune, polish, repair, or fix context	polish	references/brain-polish.md
Create, initialize, generate, or regenerate context files	create	references/create-docs.md
Audit, check, review, inspect, or suggest changes without edits	polish in --dry-run mode	references/brain-polish.md
Create or scaffold a skill	Stop	Refer to skills/create-skill
Install, discover, remove, or rename a skill	Stop	Use a dedicated skill-management workflow

If the intent is unclear, select polish in --dry-run mode and report the smallest useful planned change set.

Authority

• Explicit create, update, polish, repair, fix, or equivalent intent authorizes in-scope local writes. Inspection-only intent and --dry-run do not.
• Require explicit confirmation before deleting README.md, AGENTS.md, or CLAUDE.md entries. --force authorizes documented overwrites, not deletions.
• Treat a broad write request as authorization for the requested scope. Otherwise, preview a change set larger than a handful of files and stop before writing.
• Do not expand from documentation work into source changes, skill creation, or external writes.

Arguments

• path: Optional repo-relative subtree. Restrict documentation, package-root, and project-skill discovery to that subtree.
• skill-name ...: Optional filters for existing .agents/skills/<name>/ targets during polish.
• --root-only: Select only root README.md, AGENTS.md, and CLAUDE.md targets. Exclude project skills unless explicitly selected by skill-name.
• --dry-run: Report planned writes and concise diffs without changing files.
• --preserve: During polish, keep accurate user-authored prose and structure; fix only drift and obvious noise.
• --minimal: Produce the smallest context that still meets the completion bar.
• --thorough / --full: Perform deeper analysis only where it adds durable, repository-specific context.
• --force: During create, regenerate existing README.md or AGENTS.md targets without prompting. Never applies to skills or deletions.

If --minimal and --thorough / --full are both present, make no writes and ask the user to choose. Report unrecognized flags; continue only when they cannot change scope, safety, or write behavior.

Repository Guard Rail

Run before discovery or writes:

cwd="$(pwd -P)"
case "$cwd" in
  /) printf 'abort: refusing to run at the filesystem root\n' >&2; exit 1 ;;
  "$HOME/.agents"|"$HOME/.agents/"*|"$HOME/.claude"|"$HOME/.claude/"*)
    printf 'abort: refusing to run under ~/.agents or ~/.claude\n' >&2; exit 1 ;;
esac
repo_root="$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null)" || {
  printf 'abort: not inside a git repository\n' >&2; exit 1; }
case "$repo_root" in
  /|"$HOME") printf 'abort: unsupported repo root: %s\n' "$repo_root" >&2; exit 1 ;;
  "$HOME/.agents"|"$HOME/.agents/"*|"$HOME/.claude"|"$HOME/.claude/"*)
    printf 'abort: repo root is under ~/.agents or ~/.claude\n' >&2; exit 1 ;;
esac

Snapshot git status --short before broad edits. Preserve unrelated pre-existing changes and re-check expected paths after generators or broad commands.

Shared Constraints

Stay inside the resolved repository and preserve unrelated changes. The selected workflow reference is authoritative for README.md, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and project-skill behavior; do not repeat or broaden its file-specific rules here.

Discovery and Tool Routing

Use git-aware discovery, canonicalize every candidate beneath repo_root, and exclude VCS, dependency, environment, and build outputs. Deliberately include ignored .agents/skills/*/SKILL.md only when project skills are selected. Prefer fd, fall back once on suspiciously narrow results, and synthesize independent repository evidence before writing.

Completion and Report

After writes, run repository-defined Markdown formatting or checks when present. If skill frontmatter or agents/openai.yaml changed in a catalog, run its invocation metadata check. Verify changed CLAUDE.md symlinks resolve to sibling AGENTS.md. In --dry-run, report commands that would depend on planned files instead of running them.

Lead with ### ✅ Context updated only after writes and required validation pass, ### ⚠️ Context updated — validation failed when files were written but required checks fail, ### 🔎 Context preview — no files written in dry-run mode, or ### ⛔ Context blocked — no files written for a pre-write stop. Then report only:

1. 🧭 Mode and scope: workflow, dry-run status, target counts, and relative paths in a compact table.
2. 📦 Changes: completed or planned changes grouped by directory; use a tree when it makes path ownership clearer.
3. 🧪 Validation: exact commands, result, and any justified skip in a table.
4. ⚠️ Blockers and risks: conflicts, advisories, and unrecognized flags; omit when empty.

Keep paths, commands, guard-rail errors, symlink targets, and user-authored content exact and undecorated. Omit empty detail and stop once the selected targets meet the completion bar.

References

• polish: read references/brain-polish.md.
• create: read references/create-docs.md.