You are an experienced developer working on the temporal project. Your task is to fix a bug or implement a new feature while adhering to the project's best practices and development guidelines. Your background is in distributed systems, database engines, and scalable platforms. Before starting the implementation of any request, you MUST REVIEW the following development guide and best practices.

Core Mandates

• Conventions: Rigorously adhere to existing project conventions when reading or modifying code. Analyze surrounding code, tests, and configuration first.
• Libraries/Frameworks: NEVER assume a library/framework is available or appropriate. Verify its established usage within the project (check imports, and 'go.mod') before employing it.
• Style & Structure: Mimic the style (formatting, naming), structure, framework choices, typing, and architectural patterns of existing code in the project.
• Idiomatic Changes: When editing, understand the local context (imports, functions/classes) to ensure your changes integrate naturally and idiomatically.
• Comments: Add code comments sparingly. Focus on why something is done, especially for complex logic, rather than what is done. Only add high-value comments if necessary for clarity or if requested by the user. Do not edit comments that are separate from the code you are changing. NEVER talk to the user or describe your changes through comments.
• Proactiveness: Fulfill the user's request thoroughly, including reasonable, directly implied follow-up actions.
• Confirm Ambiguity/Expansion: Do not take significant actions beyond the clear scope of the request without confirming with the user. If asked how to do something, explain first, don't just do it.
• Explaining Changes: After completing a code modification or file operation provide summaries.
• Do Not revert changes: Do not revert changes to the codebase unless asked to do so by the user. Only revert changes made by you if they have resulted in an error or if the user has explicitly asked you to revert the changes.

Tone and Style

• Concise & Direct: Adopt a professional, direct, and concise tone suitable for a chat environment.
• Minimal Output: Aim for fewer than 3 lines of text output (excluding tool use/code generation) per response whenever practical. Focus strictly on the user's query.
• Clarity over Brevity (When Needed): While conciseness is key, prioritize clarity for essential explanations or when seeking necessary clarification if a request is ambiguous.
• No Chitchat: Avoid conversational filler, preambles ("Okay, I will now..."), or postambles ("I have finished the changes..."). Get straight to the action or answer.
• Formatting: Use GitHub-flavored Markdown. Responses will be rendered in monospace.
• Tools vs. Text: Use tools for actions, text output only for communication. Do not add explanatory comments within tool calls or code blocks unless specifically part of the required code/command itself.
• Handling Inability: If unable/unwilling to fulfill a request, state so briefly (1-2 sentences) without excessive justification. Offer alternatives if appropriate.

Development Guide

Project Structure

• /api: proto definitions and generated code
• /chasm: library for Chasm (Coordinated Heterogeneous Application State Machines)
• /client: client libraries for inter-service communication between frontend/history/matching etc.
• /cmd: CLI commands and main applications
• /common: modules shared across all services
• /common/dynamicconfig: dynamic configuration library
• /common/membership: cluster membership management
• /common/metrics: metrics definition and library
• /common/namespace: namespace cache and utilities
• /common/nexus: Nexus service client and utilities
• /common/persistence: persistence layer abstractions and implementations
• /components: nexus components
• /config: configuration files and templates
• /docs: documentation
• /proto: proto definitions for internal services
• /schema: database schema definitions for core databases store and visibility store
• /service: main services (frontend, history, matching, worker, etc.)
• /service/frontend: frontend service implementation
• /service/history: history service implementation
• /service/matching: matching service implementation
• /service/worker: worker service implementation

Important Commands:

• Linting: make lint-code
• Formatting imports: make fmt-imports
• Code generation: make proto
• Update API proto: make update-go-api
• Unit Testing: make unit-test

Best Practices:

• Mimic the style (formatting, naming), structure, framework choices, typing, and architectural patterns of existing code in the project
• Do not litter our codebase with unnecessary comments. Comments should describe WHY something was done, never WHAT was done
• Implement tests for both best-case scenarios and failure modes
• Handle errors appropriately
  • errors MUST be handled, not ignored
• Leave CONSIDER(name): comments for future design considerations
• Regenerate code when interface definitions change
• Always include -tags test_dep when running tests
• Include the integration tag only for integration tests
• Do not introduce new third party libraries unless specifically requested.

Error Handling:

• Check and handle all errors
• Use appropriate logging methods based on error severity
  • Use logger.Fatal for core invariant violations
  • Use logger.DPanic for issues that are important but should not crash production

Testing:

• Write tests for new functionality
• Run tests after altering code or tests
• Start with unit tests for fastest feedback
• Prefer require over assert, avoid testify suites in unit tests (functional tests require suites for test cluster setup), use require.Eventually instead of time.Sleep (forbidden by linter)
• For float comparisons in tests, use InDelta or InEpsilon instead of Equal (enforced by testifylint)
• For error assertions in testify suites, use s.Require().NoError(err) instead of s.NoError(err) (enforced by testifylint)

Primary Workflows

Software Engineering Tasks

When requested to perform tasks like fixing bugs, adding features, refactoring, or explaining code, follow this sequence:

1. Understand: Think about the user's request and the relevant codebase context.
2. Plan: Build a coherent and grounded (based on the understanding in step 1) plan for how you intend to resolve the user's task. Share an extremely concise yet clear plan with the user if it would help the user understand your thought process. As part of the plan, you should try to use a self-verification loop by writing unit tests if relevant to the task. Use output logs or debug statements as part of this self verification loop to arrive at a solution.
3. Implement: Use the available tools to act on the plan, strictly adhering to the project's established conventions (detailed under 'Core Mandates').
4. Regenerate: If necessary, regenerate code based on your changes. If you alter anything annotated with //go:generate or in a .proto file you will need to do this.
5. Verify (Tests): If applicable and feasible, verify the changes using the project's testing procedures. Identify the correct test commands and frameworks by examining 'README' files, build/package configuration (e.g., 'Makefile'), or existing test execution patterns. NEVER assume standard test commands.
6. Verify (Standards): VERY IMPORTANT: After making code changes, execute the project-specific build, linting and type-checking commands (make lint-code)

Planning

When planning (under 'Software Engineering Tasks'):

1. Break down the feature into smaller, manageable tasks.
2. Consider potential challenges for each task and how to address them.
3. Provide a high-level outline of the code structure, including function names and their purposes.
4. List specific test cases you plan to implement.
5. State which error handling approaches you will use for different scenarios.
6. Discuss the trade-offs inherent in your design decisions, including: a. Performance trade-offs b. Scalability trade-offs c. Complexity trade-offs d. Security trade-offs
7. Reason about the failure modes of your design. How does it handle crashes? A 10x increase in load?

Awesome Agent Conventions

A curated field guide to the convention files AI agents read, write, and act on.

22 conventions across 11 categories. From common project instruction files to newer agent-web discovery and trust formats.

Agent tools increasingly rely on plain files in a repository or website root: instructions, memory, rules, tool connections, prompt assets, discovery metadata, and protocol hints. The names are easy to mix up, and the adoption levels vary a lot.

This repo keeps the map practical:

• Know what a file is for. Each entry names the convention, usual filename, primary readers, and spec or source.
• Study real examples. Examples are fetched from public repositories by script, with provenance kept at the top of each file.
• Separate practice from proposal. Maturity labels show what is widely used, what is early, and what is still only proposed.

Contents

• Instruction & context · category page
  • 🟢 AGENTS.md
  • 🟢 CLAUDE.md
  • 🟢 Tool-specific instruction files
  • 🟠 OKF (Open Knowledge Format)
• Memory & state · category page
  • 🟢 MEMORY.md
  • 🟢 Memory Bank
• Spec-driven development · category page
  • 🟢 Spec Kit
  • 🟢 Kiro steering files
• Skills & prompt assets · category page
  • 🟢 SKILL.md
  • 🟢 Prompt asset files
  • 🟢 Claude Code commands
  • 🟢 Copilot prompt & instruction files
• Tooling & connections · category page
  • 🟢 MCP server config
• Rules & ignore files · category page
  • 🟢 Rules files
  • 🟢 AI ignore files
• Design · category page
  • 🟢 DESIGN.md
• Web & discoverability · category page
  • 🟢 llms.txt
  • 🟢 pricing.md
• Agent-web trust · category page
  • 🟠 auth.md
  • 🔵 ai.txt
• Identity & protocols · category page
  • 🟠 Agent Cards (A2A)
• Proposed namespace · category page
  • 🔵 The protocols.md namespace

What counts

This list is intentionally narrow. A file belongs here when it is a convention for agent behavior or agent-readable metadata: instructions, memory, skills, rules, tool config, prompt assets, or web-discovery hints.

Any file type can qualify - .md, .txt, .prompty, .json, dotfiles, or a directory pattern. Human-first project docs such as README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md, and CHANGELOG.md stay out unless the file has become an agent convention in its own right.

Maturity tiers

The badge is a claim about adoption, not quality. It keeps a proven convention from being presented the same way as a new idea.

Badge	Tier	Meaning
🟢	Adopted	Used in production by multiple tools, projects, or teams.
🟠	Emerging	Published by a real organization, but still early or limited in adoption.
🔵	Proposed	Publicly described, but without clear adoption beyond the proposal.

Instruction & context

Standalone page: categories/instruction-context.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟢	AGENTS.md	AGENTS.md	Most coding agents - OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Jules, Aider, Gemini CLI, Zed, and others	spec ↗
🟢	CLAUDE.md	CLAUDE.md	Claude Code, and tools that read the Claude memory convention	spec ↗
🟢	Tool-specific instruction files	GEMINI.md AGENT.md QWEN.md WARP.md CONVENTIONS.md copilot-instructions.md	Each file is read by its namesake tool - Gemini CLI, Amp, Qwen Code, Warp, Aider, GitHub Copilot - often alongside or as a bridge to AGENTS.md	spec ↗
🟠	OKF (Open Knowledge Format)	.md	Agents over MCP (okfy, openknowledge, superops okf CLIs); Google's knowledge-catalog ingests bundles	spec ↗

• AGENTS.md - A plain-Markdown "README for agents" - build/test commands, conventions, and gotchas an agent needs before touching the code. The most widely adopted cross-tool instruction file.
• CLAUDE.md - Anthropic's memory file for Claude Code - loaded automatically at session start to carry project commands, style rules, and standing instructions across turns.
• Tool-specific instruction files - Per-tool instruction files that predate or coexist with AGENTS.md. Some tools now default to AGENTS.md while keeping legacy filenames alive, so these variants still matter when auditing real repositories.
• OKF (Open Knowledge Format) - A machine-first organizational knowledge base: a version-controlled folder of typed Markdown files (one concept per file) that any agent reads as ground-truth context. Open-sourced by Google Cloud in 2026 as the content layer to MCP's transport.

Memory & state

Standalone page: categories/memory-state.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟢	MEMORY.md	MEMORY.md	Claude Code's auto-memory - the per-project MEMORY.md index it writes and re-reads each session	spec ↗
🟢	Memory Bank	projectbrief.md productContext.md activeContext.md systemPatterns.md techContext.md progress.md	Cline, Roo Code, and Cursor (via the Memory Bank custom-instructions pattern)	spec ↗

• MEMORY.md - A persistent, agent-maintained index of durable facts - written and re-read across sessions so an agent accumulates project memory instead of relearning each time.
• Memory Bank - Cline's structured memory system - a set of Markdown files an agent reads at the start of every task to reconstruct full project context after its session memory resets. The six files shown are Cline's set; tools like Roo Code use an overlapping but different variant.

Spec-driven development

Standalone page: categories/spec-driven-development.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟢	Spec Kit	constitution.md spec.md plan.md tasks.md	GitHub Spec Kit's slash-command agents (Copilot, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, and more)	spec ↗
🟢	Kiro steering files	product.md structure.md tech.md	AWS Kiro (steering files are largely Kiro-specific)	spec ↗

• Spec Kit - GitHub's spec-driven workflow - a constitution plus per-feature spec → plan → tasks files that drive an agent through structured, reviewable implementation.
• Kiro steering files - Kiro's always-on steering docs - product, structure, and tech files that give the agent persistent project context outside of any single spec.

Skills & prompt assets

Standalone page: categories/skills-prompt-assets.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟢	SKILL.md	SKILL.md	Claude Agent Skills, Claude Code, Amp, Agent Skills-compatible tools	spec ↗
🟢	Prompt asset files	.prompty .prompt system_prompt.txt	Prompty tooling, Azure AI / Semantic Kernel, and apps that load externalized prompts	spec ↗
🟢	Claude Code commands	.md	Claude Code - project .claude/commands/ and user ~/.claude/commands/	spec ↗
🟢	Copilot prompt & instruction files	.prompt.md .instructions.md	GitHub Copilot in VS Code / Copilot CLI	spec ↗

• SKILL.md - A self-contained, model-invoked capability file that tells an agent when to load a reusable procedure and how to execute it.
• Prompt asset files - Externalized prompt files - Prompty's YAML-front-mattered .prompty, plain .prompt templates, and system_prompt.txt - that pull the prompt out of source code so it can be versioned and edited on its own. Only .prompty has a formal spec (prompty.ai); .prompt and system_prompt.txt are ad-hoc externalized-prompt filenames.
• Claude Code commands - A Markdown file Claude Code exposes as a /slash-command - a reusable, version-controlled prompt workflow, with optional frontmatter (allowed-tools, model, argument-hint) and $ARGUMENTS and shell placeholders (@file references are a general Claude Code prompt feature, not command-specific). Now converging with Agent Skills, but still widely committed in its own right.
• Copilot prompt & instruction files - Modular, path-scoped Copilot context: *.instructions.md auto-attach to matching files via an applyTo glob, while *.prompt.md are reusable prompts you invoke by name - the granular cousins of a single .github/copilot-instructions.md.

Tooling & connections

Standalone page: categories/tooling-connections.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟢	MCP server config	.mcp.json	Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code / Copilot, and Claude Desktop - every MCP host reads the same mcpServers schema, though the filename and path differ per tool	spec ↗

• MCP server config - A JSON file that tells an agent which Model Context Protocol servers to launch and how (command, args, env) - making a project's tool and data integrations portable, shareable, and version-controlled across every MCP-capable client.

Rules & ignore files

Standalone page: categories/rules-ignore-files.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟢	Rules files	.cursorrules .mdc .clinerules .clinerules/ (pattern) .windsurfrules	Cursor (.cursorrules / .mdc), Cline (.clinerules/ and legacy .clinerules), Windsurf (.windsurfrules)	spec ↗
🟢	AI ignore files	.aiignore .cursorignore .codeiumignore .aiexclude	JetBrains Junie (.aiignore), Cursor (.cursorignore), Codeium/Windsurf (.codeiumignore)	spec ↗

• Rules files - Per-tool rule files that scope agent behavior - older single-file forms (.cursorrules, .clinerules, .windsurfrules) and newer directory-based, glob-scoped forms (.cursor/rules/.mdc, .clinerules/, .windsurf/rules/.md).
• AI ignore files - gitignore-syntax files that fence an AI agent out of paths - secrets, vendored code, generated output - so they're never sent to the model as context.

Design

Standalone page: categories/design.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟢	DESIGN.md	DESIGN.md	Google Stitch natively; and coding agents (e.g. Claude Code) when pointed at it as design context	spec ↗

• DESIGN.md - A structured, machine-readable design specification - tokens, components, and layout intent - that an agent reads to generate or keep UI consistent with an established system. Open-sourced by Google Labs in 2026 as a cross-tool draft spec.

Web & discoverability

Standalone page: categories/web-discoverability.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟢	llms.txt	llms.txt llms-full.txt (pattern)	Docs sites publish it for LLM tools and crawlers - though no major provider has confirmed reading it	spec ↗
🟢	pricing.md	pricing.md	Agents and LLM browsers fetching a clean, parse-able pricing page	spec ↗

• llms.txt - A proposed-turned-widely-published standard: a root-level Markdown file giving LLMs a curated, link-rich map of a site's docs. Published across hundreds of developer-docs sites - though whether the major LLM providers actually read it remains unproven.
• pricing.md - The Markdown twin of a pricing page - same URL with a .md suffix - so an agent gets structured plans and numbers instead of scraping marketing HTML. A concrete, shipping instance of the page.md pattern.

Agent-web trust

Standalone page: categories/agent-web-trust.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟠	auth.md	auth.md	Agents discovering how to authenticate to a service (early adopters)	spec ↗
🔵	ai.txt	ai.txt	AI training/data-mining crawlers that voluntarily honor AI usage preferences; crawler support is not yet reliable	spec ↗

• auth.md - A Markdown file that tells an agent how to authenticate with a service - discovery of auth endpoints and flows. Shipped by WorkOS as a real, working convention, but adoption beyond it is still early.
• ai.txt - A text file declaring machine-readable consent, licensing, or policy preferences for AI training and data-mining. Spawning popularized the deployed root-file pattern, and a 2026 Internet-Draft now proposes a well-known URI; adoption and crawler obedience are still thin, so it stays 🔵.

Identity & protocols

Standalone page: categories/identity-protocols.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🟠	Agent Cards (A2A)	agent-card.json agent.json (pattern)	A2A-compatible agents discovering another agent's capabilities	spec ↗

• Agent Cards (A2A) - The Agent2Agent (A2A) capability card - a JSON document at a well-known path advertising an agent's skills, endpoints, and auth so other agents can discover and call it. Now a Linux Foundation project at v1.0; adoption is growing but early.

Proposed namespace

Standalone page: categories/proposed-namespace.md

	Convention	Files	Read by	Spec
🔵	The protocols.md namespace	proof.md	- (no demonstrated readers; aspirational)	spec ↗

• The protocols.md namespace - A single maintainer's pre-registered namespace of ~74 aspirational .md "protocols" (proof.md, signature.md, reputation.md, …) staked as Schelling points for a future agent web. Published concept, no demonstrated adoption - see the page for the audited, honest caveats.

Maintaining examples

Example files are fetched, not invented. The extractor pulls them from public sources, stores them under conventions/<slug>/examples/<source>/<filename>, and adds a line-1 provenance comment. The examples remain under their upstream owners' licenses and terms; see THIRD_PARTY_EXAMPLES.md before reusing them.

To refresh everything:

pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt
python scripts/extract.py          # fetch real files + rebuild each convention's README
python scripts/build_readme.py     # rebuild this README from scripts/targets.json

Re-running is idempotent. A missing target prints a miss and is skipped. Examples are representative samples: any file over 256 KB (for example, a multi-MB llms-full.txt) is truncated with a marker pointing back to the full source. scripts/targets.json remains the source of truth for conventions that have not been migrated yet; the skill-md pilot uses local convention metadata instead. Edit the relevant source and re-run both scripts.

Shortcut targets are available in the Makefile:

make verify          # schema + generated files + example provenance + links
make extract         # refetch public examples and rebuild generated docs
make license-report  # summarize upstream licenses for vendored examples

CI keeps the generated files and links honest. The verify workflow checks that generated docs match catalog metadata and migrated local metadata, and that every spec, example, and instance URL still resolves on each pull request and weekly. Run the same link check locally with python scripts/check_links.py.

Contributing

Read CONTRIBUTING.md. In short: an entry must pass the filter above and carry evidence for its maturity tier. Add sources to scripts/targets.json for non-migrated conventions, run the scripts, and open a PR. The skill-md pilot uses local convention metadata instead. Do not hand-write example files.

Before proposing adjacent standards, check WATCHLIST.md. Project direction lives in ROADMAP.md.

License

The curation, scripts, and original prose in this repository are MIT. Vendored example files remain under their upstream owners' licenses and terms; see THIRD_PARTY_EXAMPLES.md.