Engineering Rules
The single source of the house engineering rules. This skill owns the ruleset; the workflows
that apply it (engineering-pr-review, engineering-refactor) invoke this one rather than
carrying their own copy.
Reading protocol
Read by need, not all at once. The ruleset is ~3,800 lines; loading it whole wastes context that the actual work needs.
rules/_sections.md— the index. Every rule id, grouped by section, one line each. Start here always.rules/<id>.md— the specific rules the work touches. Read only these.AGENTS.md— the whole ruleset compiled into one document. For skimming everything at once; not the default path.
Rule ids are kebab-case and section-prefixed (py-package-manager is in section py), so the
index tells you which files to open from the file paths alone.
Judging a rule before applying it
Each rule carries two fields that decide whether it applies here at all:
applies-to—all, or a stack tag (python,fastapi,prefect,asr,llm,nextjs,k8s,edge). A Prefect rule says nothing about a repo with no Prefect.status—current(what the repos do today),direction(where new or modernized code should head),legacy(preserve where it exists; don't expand it, don't fight it).
The local repo wins over the direction unless the user explicitly asked to modernize
(general-respect-local-repo). A repo's package manager, lockfile, CI, configured linter, and
public interfaces are contracts — judge code against what its repo actually uses, not against
a one-size-fits-all standard.
Citing rules
Cite the rule id, not a file path: "violates py-no-formatter-churn", not "violates
rules/py-no-formatter-churn.md". The id is the stable name; the path is an implementation
detail of this bundle.
Relationship to the CES catalog
In a repo scaffolded by collectiveai-team/botica, the house standards also ship as
always-on context: an index in AGENTS.md plus detail files under .agents/rules/<slug>.md,
each carrying a CES-<issue#> code (see docs/engineering-standards.md).
Where both are present, .agents/rules/ is authoritative — it is the tracked, coded,
enforced catalog, and several rule ids here share its slugs. This bundle exists to carry the
rules into repos that have no .agents/rules/ at all.