handbooks/README.md

# Handbooks

Instance-agnostic reference material for coding agents, in two shapes: long-form **handbooks** meant
for a retrieval store, and short **redirect-skills** meant to be deployed into an agent's own skill
directory. Both are authored and version-controlled here; neither is consumed directly *from* here —
a handbook isn't live until admitted to a KB, a skill isn't live until deployed to wherever it
actually runs.

## What goes here

- **Handbooks: 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; nothing here is loaded into a model's context wholesale, so length carries
  no per-turn tax.
- **Redirect-skills: short, prescriptive, and specifically pointer-shaped** — their entire job is
  telling an agent to verify against a live or handbook source rather than trust its own recall,
  for domains that churn too fast for a stored answer to stay correct (`gdext-verify-live-docs` is
  the first: gdext is pre-1.0, so the skill points at `docs.rs/gdext` and the `godot-rust` book
  instead of encoding any API surface as text). **Not** a home for full procedural skills that encode
  real workflow knowledge of their own (a debugging methodology, a review checklist) — those still
  belong wherever they're consumed, authored there directly.

## 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
  (the `engineering` corpus, for
  [halogen](https://git.novoyuuparosk.org/mikkeli/halogen-workstation-roadmap)).
- **Full procedural skills that aren't redirect-shaped.** Genuine workflow knowledge — a debugging
  methodology, a review checklist, anything that *is* the content rather than pointing at it — still
  belongs where it's consumed: the shared, git-tracked `skills/` at halogen-workstation-roadmap's
  root (OpenCode, Codex, Claude Code, via `--link`), or authored directly by an agent into its own
  runtime skill directory (hermes' per-profile home isn't git-tracked at all).
- **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.
- **The deployed copy of a skill.** This repo holds the authored source; the running copy lives
  wherever the consuming agent actually reads skills from, deployed by copy (never symlink — an
  agent may write back to its own skill files, which a symlink would corrupt at the source).
  Deployment tooling lives with the consumer, not here.

## Format

**Handbooks:** one markdown file per topic under `handbooks/`. Each file should stand as a single
admittable document — the same shape a human vouches for at KB admission time. (Redirect-skills live
under `skills/` instead, with their own format — see below.)

Each file opens with a small flat YAML frontmatter block — `title` and `collections` only, no nested
structure, so it stays greppable without a YAML dependency (same reasoning `index.py` itself gives
for hand-parsing `corpora.yaml`):

```yaml
---
title: Git operations
collections: [handbooks, dev-practice]
---
```

`title` and `collections` are the two ingest-time values that are actually about the document, so
they live with it instead of being retyped by hand at admission time — that's what let `--collection
dev-practice` and an actual admission of `handbooks` drift apart on 2026-08-22, silently, until it was
noticed by inspection rather than by anything catching it.

`version` is deliberately **not** a frontmatter field — a file can't contain the hash of the commit
that writes it, the same self-reference problem any `__COMMIT__` build stamp runs into. It stays a
value computed at admission time, same as before, just scoped to the file rather than the whole repo.

## Ingesting a handbook

Markdown needs no conversion and no extraction verifier — admit it straight from this repo, reading
`title`/`collections` from the frontmatter instead of retyping them:

```bash
F=~/dev/handbooks/handbooks/git-operations.md
TITLE=$(sed -n '/^---$/,/^---$/{/^title:/s/^title:[[:space:]]*//p}' "$F")
COLLECTIONS=$(sed -n '/^---$/,/^---$/{/^collections:/s/^collections:[[:space:]]*//p}' "$F" \
  | tr -d '[]' | tr ',' '\n' | sed 's/^ *//;s/ *$//')
VERSION=$(git -C ~/dev/handbooks log -1 --format=%h -- "$F")

index.py admit "$F" --corpus engineering --vouch mikkeli \
  --title "$TITLE" --version "$VERSION" \
  $(for c in $COLLECTIONS; do printf -- '--collection %s ' "$c"; done)
```

⚠ **`--version` is the last commit that touched *this file*, not the repo's `HEAD`.** A whole-repo
`HEAD` pin would bump every handbook's recorded version on any unrelated edit, even one that never
touched this document — the per-file form is what actually answers "which revision does this chunk
reflect."

⚠ **Re-admitting replaces a document outright, with no version history kept.** The `--version` pin is
the only record of which revision a chunk reflects, which is also why editing a file here does not by
itself update the corpus — re-admission is deliberate, a fresh claim about a specific version of a
document, not something that should happen automatically on every commit.

## Redirect-skills

Live under `skills/<name>/SKILL.md` — the same `skills/<name>/SKILL.md` shape every consuming agent
already expects, so a skill here copies straight across with no reshaping. Frontmatter is `name` +
`description` (the Agent Skills standard, not this repo's `title`/`collections`): `description` is
what a consuming agent's own trigger-matching reads to decide relevance, so it needs to name the
concrete situation the skill applies to, not just summarize the body.

A redirect-skill's body should contain no cacheable domain knowledge — only what to check, where, and
under what condition to suspect staleness over a code error. If a skill here starts accumulating API
details "for next time," that's the sign it's stopped being a redirect and started being the exact
stale cache it exists to avoid.

**Deploying one is out of scope for this repo** — copy the file into wherever the consuming agent
reads skills from, never symlink (an agent may write back to its own skill files over time, which a
symlink would corrupt at the vendor source). The deployment tooling itself lives with the consumer.

## Status

Started 2026-08-21. First handbook, `git-operations.md`, composed 2026-08-21 – 2026-08-22: branching,
committing, merging vs. rebasing, reverting and undoing, remotes and collaboration, tags and releases.
Confirmed ingestible 2026-08-22 — 30 chunks, heading paths intact, retrieved correctly.

Second handbook, `failure-handling.md`, composed 2026-08-22: input contract discipline, failure-
propagation discipline. Environment/verification parity was scoped out of it deliberately — a
different axis (how confidence is established, not how code behaves), queued as a handbook of its
own rather than folded in.

Frontmatter (`title`, `collections`) added to both 2026-08-22, after `--collection dev-practice` in
this file's own recipe was found to have drifted from `handbooks`, the value actually used at
admission — the two ingest-time values that describe the document now live with it instead of being
retyped by hand.

Scope widened 2026-08-22, superseding the same-day note above: this repo now also houses
**redirect-skills** (`skills/<name>/SKILL.md`) — short, pointer-shaped skills whose job is verifying
against a live or handbook source rather than caching an answer that would go stale. First one:
`gdext-verify-live-docs`, for `gdext` (Rust bindings for Godot 4, pre-1.0, no existing skill or MCP
tool anywhere). Full procedural skills — genuine workflow knowledge, not a pointer — still don't
belong here; they're authored where they're consumed, same as before.

Handbooks moved from the repo root into `handbooks/` the same day, for symmetry with `skills/` —
each content shape gets its own directory rather than handbooks implicitly owning the root.