Waytide

By the Eventide Project.

Reusable agent directives — the rules an AI coding agent reads at the start of a session — organized into installable packages. A package is the unit of reuse: a project adopts whole packages, never individual rules.

Waytide grew out of the design practice the Eventide Project uses in its own work. The rules were extracted from its Constant project and generalized and consolidated into these packages.

This composite repository is not itself installed into a project. It is the authoring source; a consuming project installs the individual component packages below (each has its own repository).

Packages

• foundation. The agent/ artifact framework: the rules/observations/deferred/log directories and how to work with them, the one-line decision-log format, and the ISO-8601-UTC filename convention. Everything includes it.
• language. How language is used: precisely. Words are load-bearing, so a word choice is a design decision. Name concepts literally, drop slang, and one rule per substitution.
• design-by-efferent. Human-in-the-loop, efferent-first design method (DBE): hinges and gates, the actuation-first cycle, and the method's own vocabulary.md lexicon. An updated TDD variant with accommodations for AI. Contributes the loops/ artifact directory.
• testing. Controls-based test-writing conventions: variable prefixes, test structure and naming, assertion form.
• code/ruby. Prescriptive Ruby style.
• git. Commit conventions.
• plan. How plans and design documents are written. Despite the name, it covers design docs as well as plans.

A package that has dependencies carries an install-dependencies.sh that installs them; a standalone package has none. Each arrow below points from a package to the packages it depends on (→ reads "includes"):

design-by-efferent  →  foundation, language, testing
testing             →  foundation, language
code/ruby           →  foundation, language
language            →  foundation

foundation          →  (nothing — the base every other package builds on)
git                 →  (nothing — standalone)
plan                →  (nothing — standalone)

Using a package in a project

A consuming project installs a package with git subtree, which places the package's files physically into the project's agent/rules/ tree so they are committed alongside the code and read at session start:

git subtree add  --prefix agent/rules/testing https://github.com/waytide/testing.git master --squash
git subtree pull --prefix agent/rules/testing https://github.com/waytide/testing.git master --squash

Dependency packages are not installed automatically. If the package has an install-dependencies.sh, run it from your project root to install them; otherwise the package is standalone.

Installing all packages

To adopt the whole set, install each package:

git subtree add --prefix agent/rules/foundation          https://github.com/waytide/foundation.git          master --squash
git subtree add --prefix agent/rules/language            https://github.com/waytide/language.git            master --squash
git subtree add --prefix agent/rules/testing             https://github.com/waytide/testing.git             master --squash
git subtree add --prefix agent/rules/code/ruby           https://github.com/waytide/code-ruby.git           master --squash
git subtree add --prefix agent/rules/git                 https://github.com/waytide/git.git                 master --squash
git subtree add --prefix agent/rules/plan                https://github.com/waytide/plan.git                master --squash
git subtree add --prefix agent/rules/design-by-efferent  https://github.com/waytide/design-by-efferent.git  master --squash

Refresh any package later using git subtree pull:

git subtree pull --prefix agent/rules/foundation          https://github.com/waytide/foundation.git          master --squash
git subtree pull --prefix agent/rules/language            https://github.com/waytide/language.git            master --squash
git subtree pull --prefix agent/rules/testing             https://github.com/waytide/testing.git             master --squash
git subtree pull --prefix agent/rules/code/ruby           https://github.com/waytide/code-ruby.git           master --squash
git subtree pull --prefix agent/rules/git                 https://github.com/waytide/git.git                 master --squash
git subtree pull --prefix agent/rules/plan                https://github.com/waytide/plan.git                master --squash
git subtree pull --prefix agent/rules/design-by-efferent  https://github.com/waytide/design-by-efferent.git  master --squash

Or do it all at once with install-all.sh, which installs and refreshes every package. Fetch it and run it from your project root:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/waytide/waytide/master/install-all.sh
sh install-all.sh

Project-local rules

Rules specific to a single project live under a local/ directory that mirrors the package categories (local/language, local/testing, local/code/ruby) and is never split or pushed, so a project-specific rule cannot leak upstream.

License

Waytide is in early development and is not yet licensed for use — all rights reserved. A license, the Eventide Common Interest License, is forthcoming.

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See CONTRIBUTING.md for authoring the packages themselves.