📚 AI AGENTS Rules from Programming Books

AGENTS.md rules / skills for Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, distilled from classic software engineering books about refactoring, architecture, DDD and code quality.

MIT licensed universal project rules for coding agents.

This repository contains ready-to-use rule sets inspired by well-known books on software design, architecture, refactoring, legacy code, reliability, and data-intensive systems.

For editor-specific setup in Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, see USAGE.md. It covers always-on vs on-demand usage, skills, scoped rules, MCP or RAG patterns, and the preferred setup for each editor.

Each rule set is released in three tool-agnostic Markdown versions:

• mini: the recommended version for most real task use
• nano: the compact fallback for very tight context budgets
• full: the canonical complete source and reference version

For constructive criticism from Reddit, see CRITICISM.md.

For release history, see CHANGELOG.md.

Release Matrix

Metrics:

• lines: physical line count from wc -l
• rules: Markdown list items counted with the deterministic release convention
• size: raw bytes from wc -c

| Rule Set | Full file | Full lines | Full rules | Full size | Mini file | Mini lines | Mini rules | Mini size | Nano file | Nano lines | Nano rules | Nano size | | --- | --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | | A Philosophy of Software Design | | 370 | 177 | 13561 B | | 46 | 28 | 5774 B | | 35 | 17 | 2258 B | | | | 515 | 289 | 17782 B | | 49 | 31 | 5486 B | | 36 | 18 | 2254 B | | | | 297 | 220 | 13851 B | | 47 | 29 | 3804 B | | 32 | 14 | 1235 B | | | | 354 | 180 | 12407 B | | 56 | 38 | 6717 B | | 41 | 23 | 2544 B | | | | 393 | 205 | 16084 B | | 55 | 37 | 6949 B | | 34 | 16 | 2575 B | | | | 979 | 523 | 42424 B | | 48 | 30 | 5683 B | | 39 | 21 | 2266 B | | | | 317 | 158 | 11351 B | | 56 | 38 | 6438 B | | 41 | 23 | 2535 B | | | | 337 | 177 | 12848 B | | 57 | 39 | 7333 B | | 37 | 19 | 2723 B | | | | 404 | 196 | 15501 B | | 54 | 36 | 8099 B | | 35 | 17 | 2823 B | | | | 433 | 242 | 17866 B | | 49 | 31 | 5167 B | | 37 | 19 | 1986 B | | | | 382 | 204 | 13542 B | | 48 | 30 | 6372 B | | 38 | 20 | 2205 B | | | | 359 | 179 | 13398 B | | 65 | 47 | 7165 B | | 44 | 26 | 2263 B | | | | 371 | 193 | 13817 B | | 50 | 32 | 5707 B | | 35 | 17 | 1792 B | | | | 765 | 478 | 62561 B | | 64 | 46 | 6287 B | | 41 | 23 | 2593 B |