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Rules Delivery

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Rules delivery — how rules/ reaches each host

Construct's rules/ corpus is load-bearing in two distinct ways, and each rule is honest about which applies to it (bead construct-bwis; audited in docs/notes/research/2026-06-construct-audit/50-proliferation-audit.md).

Reference-delivered rules (all hosts)

Rules cited by path in the active surface — personas, the managed AGENTS.md block, skills, other rules, the CLI (e.g. rules/common/no-fabrication.md, rules/common/commit-approval.md) — are delivered by reference: the agent reads them with its file tools when the citing prose directs it to. This works identically on every host and is the only mechanism available on Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode, whose harnesses have no per-rule glob-attachment format Construct can emit to.

Glob-delivered rules (Cursor)

Rules that declare paths: frontmatter globs (the language rules — golang/python/swift/ typescript/web) are delivered on Cursor, the one supported host with a native per-rule convention: .cursor/rules/*.mdc with comma-separated globs frontmatter, auto-attached when a matching file enters the host context.

Project-scope construct sync (lib/rules-delivery.mjs, wired from the Cursor adapter in scripts/sync-specialists.mjs):

  • emits one managed .mdc per glob-scoped rule whose globs match files actually present in the project — the project's own contents are the intent signal, so a Go rule lands only in a repo containing Go files, never all ~27 glob-scoped rules into every project;
  • names emitted files construct-\<dir>-\<name>.mdc and sweeps them when their rule stops matching, so user-authored .mdc files and the construct.mdc front-door pointer are never touched (the ADR-0027 ownership contract);
  • is idempotent — unchanged content is not rewritten.

The honesty rule

A rule's paths: frontmatter means "intended to auto-attach on matching edits", and that intent is operative only on Cursor. On Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode the same rule is reachable by reference only. The static audit (lib/audit-rules.mjs) classifies every rule as referenced / glob-scoped / orphan so neither mechanism silently decays; a rule that is neither referenced nor glob-scoped is a pruning candidate, not a delivery target.