About this project

Eric's Engineering Constitution is a reusable framework that serves as the single source of truth for how humans and AI agents collaborate on software projects. It is designed to be pulled into any Git repository as a read-only `constitution/` submodule, layered with a small set of local project files, and enforced by both AI coding agents and CI pipelines. The repository contains authoritative governance documents (CONSTITUTION.md, AI_WORKFLOW.md, INTEGRATION.md, TESTING.md, DOCUMENTATION.md, SECURITY.md, OPERATIONS.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, RELEASES.md, TODO_GUIDELINES.md, KNOWLEDGE_SOURCES.md), 25 built-in agent skills that autonomously enforce constitution rules, and a comprehensive set of reference checker scripts that validate compliance in CI. These checkers cover instruction template consistency across vendor files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, etc.), skill metadata validity, traceability of requirements to tests, OTS software inventory cross-checks, architecture dependency rules (ensuring source-code dependencies point inward per the Dependency Rule), version and release tag alignment, documentation and wiki freshness, wiki link integrity, secret scanning, and instruction weight measurement. The bootstrap script (`scripts/bootstrap.sh`) initializes an existing repository by adding the submodule, creating missing governance files, and generating an adoption report. It supports opt-in agent instruction files via `--agents` flags (claude, cursor, copilot, goose, openhands, antigravity, continue, aider, generic, all), with AGENTS.md as the default. The script never overwrites existing files by default, placing template copies in `.constitution-bootstrap/templates/` for manual merging. It also adds a standardized adoption badge to the README, managed between markers to avoid duplication. The framework includes templates for pull request completion checklists, CODEOWNERS, CI workflow gates (SHA-pinned), a Solon custom agent for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, and documentation templates for product requirements, milestone backlogs, session plans, OTS software inventories, wiki home pages, and incident postmortems. It also provides an MCP server exposing constitution docs and sources as resources, and a knowledge-source workflow for distilling books and articles into agent-consumable summaries under `sources/`. IDE integration is automatic: opening a bootstrapped repository in Visual Studio, VS Code, or JetBrains IDEs lets AI assistants (GitHub Copilot, Continue.dev, Cursor) read the committed instruction files, which point to the constitution submodule. A SessionStart hook in Claude Code flags stale submodules immediately. The framework's own CI runs the full test suite plus self-governance checkers on every pull request and push to main, and a release-tag-alignment workflow guards version tags. The project includes extensive documentation on integration, versioning (currently 1.48.0), and a worked example project layout. It is positioned as a governance layer rather than a code library, emphasizing disciplined, measurable AI-assisted development practices.