House Rules

Shoes off. Apron on.

The game is your product.
The TV is GitHub.
The food and drink is the AI.

A green robot host in a white apron, waving, in front of a pink sunburst.

The house is your codebase, or every codebase your team contributes to. Rooms say how much damage a change can do. Gates make a PR prove it belongs in the room it touches. Agents follow the same rules as the people. This site is the repository’s own markdown, rendered; the README has every command.

The house

Cross-section of a house: a red kitchen top-left, a sky-blue living room with a TV top-right, a yellow garage bottom-left and an orange driveway with a car bottom-right.

Every path in the repo lives in a room. The room sets the gate.

Kitchen

Money paths. Auth. Anything regulated.

No unsupervised guests. Ever. Two-key changes.

Living Room

Core product. The game's on in here.

Normal review, normal gates. Everybody sees it break.

Garage

Prototypes, spikes, weird ideas. Go nuts.

One rule: the garage door stays shut.

Driveway

Dashboards, scripts, Thursday's analysis.

Zero gates. Mandatory expiry. 90 days, then it gets towed.

Safe-room

Cryptography, secure storage, key material. It sits on top of whatever room the path is already in.

Two senior approvals, one from security.

A PR can touch several rooms and must tick every one. Automation labels the rooms from the diff, so nobody argues about it. Why tiers, and why by blast radius: ADR-0001.

The door policy

Rules on the fridge

Short, generic, read before you cook: AGENTS.md, plus one page of platform rules per stack.

The door

CODEOWNERS, the dependency gate and the room workflows read the base commit, so a PR cannot loosen its own rules: room automation and quality gates.

Coasters

Every rule stands on a decision that says why, so nobody has to relitigate it at the party.

Reading the room

A detective in a deerstalker hat looking through a magnifying glass.

The guests read the fridge before they touch anything. 41 agents by domain, hosted by host-agent and orchestrated by eng-manager-agent. Skills such as architecture-review give them a procedure to follow. Each agent carries a House practices section built from team memory, so the mistakes made here once stay made once.

How it fits together

flowchart LR
  subgraph Rules["Rules on the fridge"]
    A[AGENTS.md] --> P["platform/AGENTS.stack.md"]
    ADR[adr/ decisions]
  end
  subgraph Door["The door: .github/"]
    R[house/rooms.config.js] --> W[room workflows]
    CO[CODEOWNERS]
    Q[stack quality workflows]
    G[dependency gate + secret scan + PR hygiene]
  end
  subgraph Guests["Guests: .claude/"]
    H[host-agent] --> E[eng-manager-agent] --> S[specialist agents]
    H --> SK[skills]
    M[(agent-memory)]
  end
  Rules -- read by --> Guests
  Rules -- enforced by --> Door
  PR([pull request]) --> Door
  Guests -- open --> PR

Take the files home

Read Assumptions first. It lists every guess v1 makes about your repo and how to check each one; only you know where your Kitchen is.

You want…	Start with	Then read
the agents and skills everywhere you work	A personal agent set	Agents, Skills
one repo to follow the house rules	One repository	House rules, Platform rules
the same house across several repos	A set of repositories	Decisions, Agents
a tool other than Claude Code	Other AI systems	Which system reads what