install-behavioral-rules

The always-on behavioral rules (concision, no-reread, recency-gate, subagent-distill, diagnostics-tier, prove-before-scale, TDD baseline) must apply on every turn across every harness. They can't be situational skills, so each harness's user-level config is a symlink to one canonical file.

Situational rules ship as skills instead (vast-compute, ke-memory) — those load only when relevant. This installer is only for the always-on set.

Source of truth

GLOBAL-RULES.md at the arc-skills repo root. Edit it once; every symlinked harness sees the change immediately — no re-sync step. Personal/private overlay lives in ~/vault/USER.md, which the rules tell every agent to read first.

The canonical file is deliberately named GLOBAL-RULES.md, not AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md: those names are auto-loaded by context-file walk-up, so a global rules file under one of them would be injected twice (user-level config + the $HOME/AGENTS.md walk-up hit). The repo's own thin AGENTS.md pointer keeps it discoverable for humans and tools that grep the standard name.

Install / re-link

bash skills/install-behavioral-rules/inject.sh