Coding Guidelines

Behavioral guidelines to reduce common LLM coding mistakes.

Tradeoff: These guidelines bias toward caution over speed. For trivial tasks, use judgment.

For task intake and closeout procedures, see coding-lifecycle.

Project path and guidance loading

• Use project-relative paths with forward slashes for file-tool calls.
• Do not pass drive-prefixed Windows paths or copied skill-registry locations into file tools.
• Convert any skill resource under the workspace to .kilocode/skills/<skill-name>/... before reading it.
• Read skill-local guidance only when .kilocode/skills/coding-guidelines/AGENTS.md is confirmed to exist; otherwise use root AGENTS.md for project guidance.

1. Think Before Coding

Don't assume. Don't hide confusion. Surface tradeoffs.