General Development Rules

SkillDev tools

General development guidelines, nix environment, service startup, development preferences, code quality principles. Use for all Donut coding work.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.

Then ask your AI: use the General Development Rules skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by nerds-odd-e/doughnut in .agents/skills/general/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

  • Consult .agents/agent-map.md when navigation, focused commands, service assumptions, generated API guidance, ADR locations, or log inspection is unclear.
  • Architectural decisions: humans approve via docs/adrs/; agents use dough-adr-awareness (see architecture-decisions skill).
  • Run repo tooling through Nix (CURSOR_DEV=true nix develop -c …) unless documented otherwise (e.g. Cloud VM). Git commands do not need the Nix prefix — run git directly.
  • For Cursor Cloud VM without Nix, use the cloud-vm-setup skill.
  • When deleting files, prefer trash from the Nix environment instead of rm -f or rm -rf.
  • Keep high cohesion: minimize duplication, keep one representation for each concept, and place related code together.
  • Keep changes simple. Do not add defensive layers unless observed behavior requires them.
  • Failure handling: ADR 0006 (docs/adrs/0006-failure-handling-accepted.md).
  • Unit tests use the "small test" style (stable boundary, data over mocks, focused assertions, concise makeMe) — the unit-testing skill.
  • Problem, story, and execution-leaf splits must pass the gates in the problem-decomposition skill; planning artifacts and lifecycle use the planning skill.
  • Name permanent artifacts by product capability, not development history or planning sequence numbers.
  • Do not add comments or docs about past implementations in product code, tests, or permanent docs; code readers care about the current state.
  • .planning/ exception: while a plan is in progress, keep enough history in the PLAN file (slice status, brief learnings) to stop and resume across sessions. When the plan is fully executed into code and permanent docs, actively clean up spent planning history (see planning skill).
  • Planning layout and lifecycle: the planning skill.

Signals

GitHub stars
49
Forks
72
Last commit
Sep 2026
Advanced
Catalog kind
skill
Gateway key
general
Source
github.com/nerds-odd-e/doughnut