read-the-houses-agent-file-firstlisted

# Read the house's agent file first ## Purpose This repo is a set of *cross-house defaults* — practices that travel well across the repos I've contributed to. But a house that publishes its own agent instructions has already answered "how should an assistant behave here?" more specifically than any general rulebook can. Its file is local law; these skills are only the fallback where no local law exists. The discipline is one of humility about precedence: read the house's AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md first, follow it, and where it disagrees with a skill here, follow the house — then log the conflict so the skill learns the house is not alone in doing it that way. Skipping this is a compounding error: you don't just miss one instruction, you apply a generic rule *against* an explicit local one, which reads worse than having no process at all. The house told you, in writing, and you brought a template instead. ## When to use - First thing on any repo, before invoking any other skill here. - When two rules seem to conflict and you need to know which wins (the house does). - When a maintainer references "our AGENTS.md" / "the conventions" in review. ## When NOT to use If the house ships no agent file at all, there's nothing to defer to — fall back to these skills as the defaults they are (and to obey-the-houses-own-tooling for the build/generator conventions, which is about tasks, not agent instructions). ## The practice (checklist) - [ ] Look for the house's agent file: `AGENTS