Introduction
The agentic coding template, short act, is a set of files you put into a project so that your AI coding assistant works to a fixed, inspectable method. It contains rules, skills, sub-agent roles, hooks, and scripts. It works in a new project and in one that already exists.
What it gives you
Section titled “What it gives you”- A division of labor. You set goals and decide. The main assistant, the orchestrator, plans, reviews, and commits. It hands bounded assignments to specialized workers. See Roles.
- A process with evidence. An idea gets a concept with options before it is built. A result counts as done only with a test run, a commit, or an outside call as proof.
- State in the repository. Tasks, backlog, questions, inbox, and journal sit in
docs/ai/, so every session can continue from the board. - Recurring work as skills. A skill is a plain
SKILL.mdthat any assistant can follow, for exampleact-bug,act-commit,act-release. See the skills reference.
Who it is for
Section titled “Who it is for”Teams and solo developers whose project lives longer than one session: work is handed over between sessions or people, existing code gets changed, or a mistake such as a leaked secret would be expensive.
What it is not
Section titled “What it is not”- Not a framework or a library. Nothing from it ends up in your build or at runtime.
- Not free of cost. The rules load at the start of every session, roughly 8,000 to 9,000 tokens with one coding rule set, and about as much again for each sub-agent. The assistant also does more per task: tests as evidence, a review, a journal entry. For a one-off script or a throwaway prototype that costs more than it saves.
- Not a guarantee in every tool. Mechanical enforcement through hooks exists only in Claude Code (see below).
How it works in one picture
Section titled “How it works in one picture”A project has two layers that never mix.
| Layer | Where | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| Template | .act/ |
The template. Replaced as a whole by an update, never edited in the project. |
| Project | docs/ai/ (working state), docs/project/ (your documentation) |
You. An update never overwrites your content. |
Around them sit the small files each tool reads (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .claude/, .agents/skills/) and
.act-local/, which stays on your machine. A project version of a template file goes to
docs/ai/local/<same path> and wins. Details: Layers and overrides.
Supported AI tools
Section titled “Supported AI tools”| Tool | Reads | What it gets |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | CLAUDE.md, .claude/ |
Everything: rules by import, skills by name, sub-agent roles with a model and effort tier, hooks, a status line, the board at session start. |
| Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor | AGENTS.md, .agents/skills/ |
Rules and skills as instructions. No hooks, so nothing is enforced mechanically, and no sub-agent roles. |
| Gemini CLI | GEMINI.md, .agents/skills/ |
The skills. A project has no GEMINI.md yet, so point Gemini CLI at AGENTS.md in its settings. |
| Any other assistant | none | Tell it to read docs/ai/rules.md. Every skill is a plain SKILL.md. |
The tools in use are the tools key in docs/ai/config.md, default claude-code. Every project gets
AGENTS.md and the skill copies under .agents/skills/.
Requirements
Section titled “Requirements”Python 3.9 or newer, standard library only, for the setup, the scripts, and the hooks. Next: start a new project or adopt an existing one.