Imported from willhama/md-file-study (corpus_full/Gitlawb__zero/files/AGENTS.md). Install upstream with npx skills add willhama/md-file-study --skill files. Copyright stays with the author.

Repository Guidelines for Zero

These instructions apply to all work in this repository. For the user-facing guide to extending Zero with specialists, hooks, plugins, MCP, and skills, see docs/EXTENDING.md.

1. Contribution and Pull Request Rules

• Before opening any pull request, all contributors—including maintainers, community contributors, and coding agents—must read and follow CONTRIBUTING.md.
• Community pull requests require an existing parent issue with the issue-approved label. Team members may open pull requests through the internal development process described in CONTRIBUTING.md.
• Keep each change focused on the approved or assigned scope. Do not include unrelated fixes, refactors, formatting churn, generated output, or existing local changes in the same commit or pull request.
• Discuss new implementation languages, runtimes, major dependency changes, and broad architectural rewrites with maintainers before implementation.
• Pull request descriptions must explain what changed and why, link the parent issue when required, and list the tests or verification performed. Include screenshots or a short recording for user-visible UI changes when practical.

2. Repository and Implementation Conventions

• Use the Go version declared in go.mod. Do not hardcode a different local toolchain version in scripts or documentation.
• Use the repository build and release commands (make and go run ./cmd/zero-release ...) instead of inventing parallel build flows.
• Keep tests beside their source files (foo_test.go next to foo.go). Add a regression test for behavior changes and run affected concurrent code under the race detector.
• Never edit files under third_party/; they are vendored.
• Prefer one cross-platform function with small conditional checks over duplicated platform-specific helpers when the behavior can remain unified.
• Do not commit generated benchmark reports from internal/perfbench/reports/*.json; reports are configuration-specific evidence, not repository state.
• Preserve the user's working tree. Do not overwrite, delete, stage, or commit unrelated tracked or untracked files.

3. Required Validation

Run validation from the repository root before committing, opening a pull request, or completing an implementation task:

1. Formatting check: make fmt-check. If it fails, format with go fmt ./... (or make fmt) and run the check again.
2. Vet: go vet ./... (or make vet).
3. Tests: go test ./.... Use make test for the full race-enabled suite, or run focused tests with -race, when concurrency is affected.
4. Build: go run ./cmd/zero-release build.
5. Smoke test: go run ./cmd/zero-release smoke.
6. Advisory lint: make lint-static.
7. Security: make vulncheck.
8. Diff hygiene: git diff HEAD --check (covers staged and unstaged tracked changes).

make lint currently runs the formatting check and go vet; it does not run golangci-lint. The pinned golangci-lint job is advisory in CI while the existing repository-wide backlog is cleaned up. Fix findings introduced by or related to the current change. Unrelated pre-existing advisory findings do not justify expanding a focused pull request; report them separately.

Formatting, vet, tests, build, smoke, diff hygiene, and govulncheck are hard requirements. If a related check fails, fix it. If a required check cannot run because of the environment or fails for an unrelated external reason, report the exact failure and obtain maintainer direction rather than silently ignoring it.