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Customization

Fill in the project files for your stack, write skills and helper prompts of your own, and relax a quality gate where it does not fit your work. Skills you write with ab-writing-skills follow the same rules as the blueprint’s, so they run in every tool.

Adapting to your project

After installing, ask for the ab-project-start skill to fill in:

GOALS.md: three to five project objectives with a priority each
CONVENTIONS.md: the stack, the test, lint and dev commands, naming, file layout
STATUS.md: the current state, known issues, recent work
AGENTS.md: the instructions every tool loads; the scaffold merges its sections into an existing file and keeps yours

Adding your own skills

The blueprint’s skills are installed once. Project-specific skills live in your project’s own skills folder (.agents/skills/ for the tools that read it, or wherever your tool looks). Ask for the ab-writing-skills skill to write one; it holds the rules and the test-first method:

agentskills frontmatter only (name, description, plus argument-hint and disable-model-invocation), no model or effort
the whole SKILL.md under 8,000 bytes, with detail moved into references/ at the point of use
other skills named in prose, never with a slash, because every tool invokes skills differently
steps that depend on the tool written with the capability snippets in skills/ab-writing-skills/references/capability-snippets.md (helper step, asking the user, task tracking, lower effort, working folder, provenance, no-commit mode, bundled scripts), so the skill runs in every tool
no tool variables such as ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}, no $ARGUMENTS, no path outside the skill’s own folder

> Create a skill for database migration workflows
# The ab-writing-skills skill will:
# 1. Write a failing test scenario
# 2. Create the skill
# 3. Verify it handles the scenario

Adding your own helper prompts

Put a prompt file in the skill that dispatches it, under references/agents/<name>.md, with no frontmatter. Open it with a one-line role header (what it may change, whether it is safe at lower effort, and that it starts no helpers of its own) and end it with an ## Output section, so a helper run and an inline run return the same shape. The skill hands work to it with the helper-step snippet. The ab-writing-skills skill covers the details.

Adjusting quality gates

The gates are written into the skill files. To relax one (for example, no code review for docs-only changes), edit the corresponding skill’s SKILL.md and add your exception; keep the file under 8,000 bytes.