add

Create a New Rule

Generate a Clawness rule from the user's description.

Process

1. Understand the intent — The user describes a coding practice they want enforced. Parse their description for:

   • What domain this falls under (nextjs, react, python, etc.)
   • Whether it should be mandatory (always enforced) or ranked
   • The severity (error for "must do", warning for "should do", info for "consider")

2. Generate the YAML — Create a properly formatted rule:

   id: DOMAIN-DESCRIPTIVE-NNN
   domain: detected_domain
   severity: error|warning|info
   tags: [relevant, search, keywords]
   triggers: [code, tokens, that, signal, relevance]
   when: Clear condition for when this rule applies.
   rule: >
     The actual instruction, written clearly and specifically.
   violation: "Concrete example of what NOT to do"
   correct: "Concrete example of what TO do"
   

3. Tags and triggers are critical — These drive retrieval. Include:

   • The concepts involved (e.g., "caching", "auth", "state")
   • The code tokens someone would use (e.g., "useEffect", "fetch", "router")
   • The framework/library names (e.g., "nextjs", "prisma", "zod")

4. Save the rule — Determine the right location:

   • If .clawness/rules/ exists in the project, save there (project-scoped)
   • Otherwise, save to the global rules directory
   • Ask the user to confirm before writing

5. Test it — Run a test query to verify the rule would be retrieved for the kind of prompt it should match.

Example

User says: "Always use server actions for form mutations in Next.js"

→ Generates a rule with:

• domain: nextjs
• tags: [server-actions, forms, mutations, use-server]
• triggers: [form, submit, action, mutation, create, update, delete]
• Saves to the appropriate rules directory