AGENTS Book Rules

!AGENTS Book Rules

MIT licensed universal project rules for coding agents.

This repository contains ready-to-use rule sets inspired by well-known books on software design, architecture, refactoring, legacy code, reliability, and data-intensive systems.

For editor-specific setup in Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, see USAGE.md. It covers always-on vs on-demand usage, skills, scoped rules, MCP or RAG patterns, and the preferred setup for each editor.

Each rule set is released in three tool-agnostic Markdown versions:

• `mini`: the recommended version for most real task use
• `nano`: the compact fallback for very tight context budgets
• `full`: the canonical complete source and reference version

For constructive criticism from Reddit, see CRITICISM.md.

Release Matrix

Metrics:

• `lines`: physical line count from `wc -l`
• `rules`: Markdown list items counted with the deterministic release convention
• `size`: raw bytes from `wc -c`

| Rule Set | Full file | Full lines | Full rules | Full size | Mini file | Mini lines | Mini rules | Mini size | Nano file | Nano lines | Nano rules | Nano size |

| — | — | —: | —: | —: | — | —: | —: | —: | — | —: | —: | —: |

| A Philosophy of Software Design | full | 320 | 151 | 10454 B | mini | 36 | 18 | 2497 B | nano | 29 | 11 | 1029 B |

| Clean Architecture | full | 471 | 226 | 14355 B | mini | 34 | 16 | 2191 B | nano | 29 | 11 | 931 B |

| Clean Code | full | 246 | 173 | 10595