baron: Instructions file for Claude Code

Baron — Project Rules

Baron is a platform-agnostic work-orchestration layer for AI coding agents. It lets an agent (or a CI pipeline) drive work tracking, source control, and notifications across many providers through one normalized contract, instead of hardwiring a single vendor's API and one team's process template into prompts.

Read ARCHITECTURE.md first — it is the single source of truth for the foundational decisions. This file is the day-to-day working contract.

Tech stack

• TypeScript (NodeNext, strict), ESM only. Node >= 20 at runtime; developing needs Node 22+ (pnpm 11).
• pnpm workspaces monorepo.
• vitest (tests), biome (lint + format), tsup (build for publish).

Local development

pnpm install
pnpm test          # vitest run (all packages)
pnpm typecheck     # tsc --noEmit per package
pnpm lint          # biome check
pnpm lint:fix      # biome check --write

Workspace packages resolve to source (src/index.ts) in dev — no build step needed to run tests or typecheck. publishConfig in each package.json flips main/types/exports to dist for release; pnpm build (tsup) produces it. Do not point dev consumers at dist.

Architecture invariants (do not violate without revisiting ARCHITECTURE.md)

1. Capability ports, not "a tracker." Work is organized into independent ports — issues, scm, notify, docs — each bound to a provider independently. A consumer mixes providers (Linear issues + GitHub PRs + Slack notify). Never assume one provider spans all ports.
2. Semantic role layer. Recipes and primitives speak abstract roles (backlog → ready → in_progress → in_review → done, plus blocked). Providers map their native states/columns/labels onto roles via config (baron init introspects + a human confirms). Never hardcode a provider-native state in core or recipe logic.
3. Primitives in core, workflows in recipes. The core exposes primitives only (issue.create, issue.transition, ...). Workflow opinion (when to move to in_review, PR body shape, hierarchy rules) lives in declarative YAML recipes outside the core. Do not bake workflow opinion into the core or into an adapter.
4. Adapters carry no translation logic. An adapter contributes only a CapabilityManifest and an IssuesTransport (provider I/O). All role↔native translation and gap negotiation live in the shared BaseIssuesAdapter. If you find yourself writing role/state mapping inside an adapter, it belongs in core.
5. Capability gaps are never silent. When an operation needs a capability the provider lacks, behavior is decided by explicit policy: error (loud, actionable), emulate:<strategy> (synthesize, e.g. GitHub hierarchy via labels), or degrade (skip + warn log). A gap that is neither errored nor logged is a bug.