Every team using AI coding agents starts the same way: someone drops a CLAUDE.md
(or .cursorrules
, or a copilot-instructions.md
) into a repo. It works. So the next repo gets one too. And the next.
Then you look up and you have 20 repos, 6 teammates, and 3 different AI tools — and no two of those config files are the same. Which one is right? Nobody knows.
I hit this wall running an integration platform with dozens of small repos. This post is the pattern I landed on, and a small open template you can clone to do the same.
A single file is perfect for one repo and one person. At team scale it fails in five predictable ways:
None of these are exotic. They're just what happens when a copy-pasted file meets a growing team.
awesome-cursorrules
) are great for inspiration, but they're copy-paste, single-tool, and have no sync or freshness.AGENTS.md
The gap: nobody treats the standards themselves as code — owned, versioned, reviewed, and automatically distributed.
Three moves:
SKILL.md
format.skills/
and rules/
into your tool's config directory. Git hooks re-run the sync on every pull
/ checkout
/ rebase
.
Git repo (source of truth) ~/.cursor/
skills/ ──────────────└ skills/ (junction/symlink)
rules/ ──────────────┤ setup + rules/ (synced .mdc)
└── git hooks ─────────→ every workspace, every teammate
Because rules sync to the user level, they apply in every workspace automatically. Update the repo, everyone git pull
s, and the whole team's standards move together — no per-repo copies.
CLAUDE.md
| standards-as-code | bare CLAUDE.md
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Scales across repos | Yes (one source) | No (N copies) |
| Versioned + PR-reviewed | Yes | No |
| Auto-distributed | Yes (sync + hooks) | Manual |
| Freshness mechanism | Yes (later in the series) | No |
It's the difference between a shared library and a code snippet everyone pastes.
I packaged the mechanism as an open template: ** agent-standards-kit** (this post pins
v0.1
).
git clone https://github.com/prathakmalik/agent-standards-kit.git
cd agent-standards-kit
./scripts/setup.ps1 # Windows/Cursor; no admin needed
Restart Cursor and your sample skills + rules are live. Swap in your own — the repo ships templates and a de-identified worked example.
This is not another skills manager — that niche is crowded. It's a methodology plus a starter template, proven on a real multi-repo platform. Its value is the boring, durable stuff: team+repo scoping via plain git, review of changes, and (coming in this series) a loop that keeps the standards from rotting. If you're one dev on one repo, a single file is genuinely fine. The moment there's a team, treat your AI standards like code.
Coming up next (v0.2): One source of truth is great — but your team doesn't all use the same AI tool. Next post: making the same skills and rules work across Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot, with cross-platform setup (bash and PowerShell). Star the repo to follow along.
If you found this useful, a ⭐ on the repo helps more than you'd think.