ad-guidelines

A guide for creating or updating GUIDELINES.md, a repository file that records the project's full engineering standards and practices. It covers topics such as code structure, design principles, testing, and security rules.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when setting or revising engineering guidelines, code standards, SOLID principles, Object Calisthenics rules, testing strategy, or security policy. It first examines the codebase and directs architectural, product, vocabulary, decision, or hook-related work to other guides.
Why use it?
It gives the team one detailed reference for how the code should be built and maintained. It also keeps that reference aligned with the shorter rules in AGENTS.md and the broader workflow in WORKFLOW.md.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/corridortech/posecap/ad-guidelines
Any agent
npx skills add CorridorTech/PoseCap --skill ad-guidelines
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CorridorTech/PoseCap

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 214 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,066 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00214 $0.02066
Opus 5 $0.00107 $0.01033
Sonnet 5 $0.00043 $0.00413
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00207

Measured 2d ago against content hash 245a15622eee, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ad-guidelines scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.agents/skills/ad-guidelines/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

<background_information> Layer 1 Constitution trinity member. Lazy lifecycle owner of GUIDELINES.md at the repo root. Companion to WORKFLOW.md (universal philosophy, kit-shipped) and AGENTS.md (distilled non-negotiable rules read every session).

GUIDELINES.md is the full reference; AGENTS.md is the distilled summary. Each AGENTS.md section that has detail points to the corresponding GUIDELINES.md section. The two never duplicate — ad-drift flags duplication as drift.

Skill is excluded from poc profile. Universal at solo / team / mature.

Codex auto-trigger on description keywords is less mature than Claude Code's. If auto-invocation does not fire when the user mentions engineering guidelines, code standards, SOLID, Object Calisthenics, testing strategy, or security policy, invoke this skill manually. </background_information>

Route elsewhere when:

  • Scope is system structure → ad-architecture.
  • Scope is product → ad-prd.
  • Scope is vocabulary → ad-domain.
  • Scope is one binding decision → ad-adr.
  • Scope is wiring the gates → ad-hooks.

Step 1 — codebase-first scan. Before any preference question, detect:

Language and toolchain:

  • package.json → JS/TS; read engines, scripts, deps, devDeps.
  • Cargo.toml → Rust; read edition, deps, dev-dependencies.
  • pyproject.toml / setup.cfg / requirements.txt → Python.
  • CMakeLists.txt / CMakePresets.json / vcpkg.json → C/C++.
  • go.mod → Go.
  • Gemfile, pom.xml, build.gradle, composer.json for other stacks.

Test framework: jest/vitest/playwright/mocha configs, pytest, cargo [dev-dependencies], catch2/gtest in CMake, _test.go files.

Lint and format: .eslintrc.*, .prettierrc.*, .rustfmt.toml, clippy.toml, .ruff.toml, mypy.ini, .clang-format, .clang-tidy, .golangci.yml.

Hooks and CI: .husky/, lefthook.yml, .pre-commit-config.yaml, .githooks/, .github/workflows/, .gitlab-ci.yml, .circleci/.

Existing standards:

  • AGENTS.md ## Code Style and ## Architectural Principles — extract into GUIDELINES, replace with pointers.
  • ARCHITECTURE.md ## Source Tree and ## Dependency Rules — informs Clean Architecture §1.1.
  • doc/adr/ — binding decisions about error handling, naming, DI — carry forward.
  • CONTEXT.md — domain vocabulary the guidelines must respect.

Canonical examples: for brownfield projects, identify candidate source files that future agents should imitate. Prefer one boundary example, one core/domain function, and one test. Record paths only, never pasted snippets. If no representative code exists, omit the section until the project has examples worth copying.

Profile: read .claude/agentic-state.json / .agents/agentic-state.json. Profile shapes strictness defaults (mature → strict Object Calisthenics by default; solo → loose).

Only after the scan produces no answer does the skill ask. Asking about something the repo already states wastes the user's attention.

Step 2 — pre-fill the template. Open templates/guidelines.md. Fill detected fields before any interview:

  • §2.1 naming conventions table per language idiom.
  • §2.2 error handling per language idiom.
  • §2.5 canonical examples table, when representative code exists: boundary code, core/domain logic, and tests. Confirm the picks with the user before writing; do not declare weak code canonical.
  • §6.1 toolchain + version + source-of-truth config file.
  • §6.2 dependency manager from detected manifest.
  • §7 static-analysis tools detected.
  • §8 quality gates from hooks scan; mark <not yet wired — invoke /ad-hooks> when absent.
  • §9.2 unit-test framework detected.
  • §9.6 tag taxonomy kit defaults.
  • §10 git workflow kit pattern (Conventional Commits, DCO sign-off via ad-commit).
  • §11.1 document scope table kit-standard.
  • §12 security boundaries from scan.

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 120 lines · 214 tokens per session scan A 245a15622eee

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ad-guidelines is a skill published in the GitHub repository CorridorTech/PoseCap (190 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 214 tokens to every session and 2,066 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

brainstorming

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.

obra/superpowers · 37 tokens

auto-perf-optimize

Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.

microsoft/vscode · 62 tokens

chat-perf

Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.

microsoft/vscode · 51 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens