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Core development instructions

ID ap-core-instructions
Kind instruction
Selection required
Category Core
Targets claude, codex, cursor

Project orientation, independent judgment, investigation, quality, and completion guidance.

Always loaded after initialization. No separate chat invocation is required. Specialized workflows belong in skills and subagents so this core set stays concise.

  1. Project orientation — read PRD.md, TECHNICAL_REQUIREMENTS.md, and TODOs.md (or equivalents) before planning or changing code.
  2. Independent judgment — challenge weak assumptions; surface material tradeoffs; follow explicit user direction after stating concerns.
  3. Clear explanations — lead with what happened, why it matters, what changed, and how it was verified.
  4. Investigation standard — gather evidence before concluding; verify version-sensitive APIs against current docs and the repo.
  5. Implementation quality — match sound conventions; prefer simple complete solutions; avoid speculative abstractions.
  6. Debugging and QA — treat symptoms as evidence, keep competing hypotheses, verify fixes with reproduction and checks.
  7. Task completion — define success criteria, run relevant checks, update docs when substantial subsystems change.

Installed automatically with every Agents Pack initialization. It cannot be removed.

Agents Pack renders this content into native locations such as:

  • Claude Code rules under .claude/rules/agents-pack/
  • a managed block inside AGENTS.md (Codex; repository or global)
  • Cursor rules under .cursor/rules/agents-pack/ (repository scope)

Text outside managed blocks remains yours. See Ownership and File layout.