Agent Operating Standards is a standards repository for agent-readable engineering practices: documentation surfaces, durable artifacts, issue formats, pull request descriptions, repository hygiene, and workflow evidence.
The repository is intended to make recurring agent work explicit, reviewable, and reusable across projects without turning chat history or local convention into hidden authority.
This repository owns standards for:
- agent-facing documentation structure and routing;
- durable artifact naming, retention, and provenance expectations;
- issue and pull request templates;
- repository baseline settings and governance hygiene;
- workflow evidence shape, when a workflow standard is explicitly admitted.
This repository does not own product behavior, consumer project policy, merge approval, release approval, security triage authority, or production readiness for repositories that adopt these standards.
Normative changes should enter through pull requests and identify:
- the problem being standardized;
- the owner surface for the rule;
- the invariant the rule preserves;
- the failure mode the rule prevents;
- the proof, review, or adoption path for the rule;
- explicit non-claims.
Templates in .github/ are repository workflow aids. They are not standards by
themselves unless a normative standards document points to them.
The repository starts with a minimal governance baseline:
- issues are enabled;
- wiki and projects are disabled to avoid duplicate documentation authority;
- squash merge is the only enabled pull request merge method;
mainis protected by an active pull-request and linear-history ruleset;- merged branches are deleted automatically;
- secret scanning and push protection are enabled;
- Dependabot is configured for GitHub Actions metadata once workflows exist.
Workflow gates and required status checks are intentionally not defined yet. They should be added only after the standard for workflow evidence is admitted.