init-context

Install the project surfaces a repository needs so that every future session — and every teammate, with or without manifest-dev — works from the same direction, the same vocabulary, and the same decision record.

Two things get installed, and only the first is essential:

• The wiring — an ADR conventions file the project owns, a glossary, a North Star (the project's standing strategy surface: who it is for, what it promises, what winning means), and a project-context-file section that makes sessions read and maintain all three. This runs on every project, including one with no history at all.
• A seed — vocabulary and decision records reconstructed from the project's own history. This runs wherever there is history to read, and it is enrichment on top of the wiring, never a substitute for it.

Aim for a good starting point rather than a complete record. Most of a project's past reasoning is genuinely unrecoverable; a seed that is honest about what it could not recover is worth far more than one that reads complete and isn't.

Flags

--no-mine skips the seed and installs the wiring alone. Mining otherwise runs wherever there is history — a project with no commits, no docs and no code simply has nothing to seed from, which needs no flag to express.

Interpret only top-level options as flags; quoted or code-formatted mentions of them are topic text.

What already exists governs

Read before writing, and never overwrite a surface the project already maintains:

• docs/adr/CONVENTIONS.md exists → the project has its own ADR convention. It governs. Do not replace it, and follow it for anything written this run — then compare it, per Compare, then offer below, which covers this file, docs/NORTH_STAR_CONVENTIONS.md, and the context file's surfaces section alike.
• CONTEXT.md exists (or the context named by a root CONTEXT-MAP.md) → load it. Mined vocabulary is proposed as additions to it, never as a replacement.
• NORTH_STAR.md exists → load it. Seeded content is proposed as additions or as evidence for positions it already carries — never as a rewrite: its positions change only by the owner's ruling, per the maintenance rules in references/NORTH_STAR_FORMAT.md.
• docs/adr/ holds records but there is no CONVENTIONS.md → the project has an unwritten convention, and the records are the evidence of it. Infer it from them — naming scheme, which sections they carry, how they cross-reference, what the index looks like — and write the conventions file to describe that, adapting the shipped default rather than replacing it. Installing the default unchanged here would declare an existing corpus non-conforming, which is both wrong and the fastest way to get the file ignored. Where the corpus is inconsistent, or where following it would leave the index un-rebuildable, say so and let the user choose; never silently pick.
• A project context file already carries some of this wiring → add the wiring it lacks and leave the rest alone; where its surfaces section is present but differs from the template, compare and offer rather than rewrite, per Compare, then offer below.