How it fits

The three places the practice lives, how a project connects to it, and how a rule changes.

The practice keeps three kinds of thing apart, because each has a different owner and a different audience.

Part	What it holds	Who may have it
The practice (this repo)	The house rules (`skills/house-*`), the skill that feeds review findings back into them (`skills/standards-feedback`), the guard hooks (`hooks/`), the herdr skill, and these docs	Anyone you share the practice with
A project repo	Its code, and in its `CLAUDE.md` only what an agent cannot find in the code: the project profile, the forge, the project map	That project’s team
Your environment	Your machines, your own tool skills, the forge address, the package registry, the secret tool	You alone

Nothing in the practice names your environment. Where a hook or a rule needs a fact about it, it reads a setting (for example HOOK_SECRET_TOOL for the secret tool) or the project’s CLAUDE.md names it (for example the forge).

How the rules reach an agent

The house rules are Agent Skills: a folder with a SKILL.md. A skills tool such as skillshare links each folder into every agent you use, so an agent loads house-architecture and the language’s house skill when its task matches. The rules are written for any agent framework, or none.

The guard hooks run before a tool call. They are plain copies in the agent’s hooks folder (for Claude Code, ~/.claude/hooks/), registered from hooks/gates.json. hooks/check-live.sh reports a copy that drifted from this repo, and a hook that would not block if it failed to start.

Who wins when they disagree

The project’s CLAUDE.md, or an ADR in that project, for that project.
The house skills, over any other installed skill or workflow.
Everything else.

How a rule changes

A mistake that a house rule should have prevented is a defect in the rules, not only in the code. After a review, standards-feedback sorts each finding:

The project only: fix it, or open an issue, in that repo.
A rule is missing, unclear or contradicts another: change the house skill here.
A rule is too deep (only in a references/ file, or written for one kind of caller): move it into SKILL.md.
A rule nothing enforces: add a check that a tool runs (a build check, a gate step or a lint rule) and name it in the rule.
A rule needs a fact the project never declared: add a question to the project template.

Prefer a check to more words. A merged change reaches every agent at its next sync, and every project at its next template update.