# Handbooks

Instance-agnostic reference material for coding agents — the verbose, citable kind that belongs in
a retrieval store, not in a skill.

## What goes here

- Public standards, style guides, and conventions that apply regardless of which box or project is
  running — general git operations, language style guides, CERT/MISRA-style rulebooks.
- Long-form and specific. A handbook can be as detailed as it needs to be; nothing here is loaded
  into a model's context wholesale, so length carries no per-turn tax.

## What does not go here

- **Anything specific to one machine or one project.** A local Gitea's branch-naming rule, this
  box's PR checklist — that's instance-bound and belongs in that project's own KB corpus instead
  (`kb-engineering` for [halogen](https://pi5-16.local/mikkeli/halogen-workstation-roadmap)).
- **Short, prescriptive procedures achievable within a context window or two.** That's a skill, not
  a handbook — it gets loaded, not retrieved. See `skills/` in the halogen-workstation-roadmap repo
  for the sibling convention.
- **The retrieval store itself.** This repo holds the source-of-truth markdown a human has vouched
  for. The chunked, embedded index built from it is derived and rebuildable state — it lives beside
  whichever KB is consuming it, never committed here.

## Format

One markdown file per topic at the repo root. Each file should stand as a single admittable
document — the same shape a human vouches for at KB admission time.

## Status

Started 2026-08-21. First handbook: general git operations.