wife: Instructions file for Claude Code

Wife — shared instructions for coding agents

This is Wife's canonical repository instruction file. The repository is intentionally AGENTS.md-first: Claude Code 2.1.77+ and Codex can read this file directly. There is no root CLAUDE.md, so Claude Code can take this file through its AGENTS discovery path instead of preferring a legacy file.

Wife is a local memory layer for coding agents. It has zero runtime dependencies and no build step: the source in src/ is what runs.

If the user wants to install it

Run these, in this order, from this folder:

npm link            # puts the `wife` command on their PATH
wife init           # creates ~/.wife
wife attach claude  # or: wife attach codex
wife status         # confirm, then show them the output

Then tell them to restart their agent so the hooks load.

wife attach merges into the existing settings file and removes nothing. If npm link fails with a permission error, report it rather than reaching for sudo — the usual cause is that npm's global bin directory is not on PATH.

If the user wants to change something

Run npm run check before and after. It covers the unit, end-to-end, multi-machine sync and multi-agent suites, and it must stay green. New behaviour needs a new test.

Where things live:

• src/core/extract.js — the pattern rules that turn prompts into candidate facts, plus the rejection filters. Most feature requests land here.
• src/core/store.js — markdown file plus metadata sidecar, scoring, pruning. Hand edits to the markdown always win over the sidecar.
• src/core/harvest.js — the curator: extract, gate, reconcile, retire, prune.
• src/core/import.js — seeding from existing CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md. Screens for credentials BEFORE any text cleanup; reversing that order once let a token through, because stripping markdown emphasis also ate the underscore.
• src/core/crossproject.js — the only state that spans repos.
• src/core/guards.js — rules that a PreToolUse hook can enforce. Guards must FAIL OPEN and must never be created without the user approving each one. A description ("Uses pnpm") is not a prohibition and must never become a guard.
• src/core/merge.js + src/commands/gitsync.js — multi-machine sync. Two traps live here: merge=ours is NOT a git built-in and must be defined as a driver or every sync dies on a markdown conflict; and markdown must be DELETED before regenerating from a merged index, or Store.load re-adopts facts the other machine deliberately deleted.
• src/agents/ — one file per agent integration.
• src/commands/hooks.js — code that runs inside a hook. It must never exit non-zero and must never print anything unexpected to stdout.