Getting Started

This page walks a new project through adopting Eric's Engineering Constitution. It is the wiki companion to README.md's "Getting Started" section.

Prerequisites

Make this repository reachable. Publish or clone Eric's Engineering Constitution somewhere your projects can add it as a submodule.
Bootstrap the target project. From this repository, run the installer against the project you want to adopt the standard. The commands are bash, the same on Linux, macOS (Homebrew bash), and Windows Git Bash — the README's Quick Start says how to get bash 4+ on each:
```
./scripts/bootstrap.sh /path/to/project <repository-url>
```
By default only AGENTS.md is installed as the agent-instruction bridge. Add vendor-specific files for the tools the project actually uses:
```
./scripts/bootstrap.sh --agents=claude,cursor /path/to/project <repository-url>
```
See Bootstrap Script for exactly what gets installed and why the default is deliberately minimal.
Review and finish the adoption. Open .constitution-bootstrap/adoption-report.md in the target project, merge any skipped template content into existing files, and replace every template placeholder with real, project-specific content — a copied template is not finished documentation. Then commit the constitution/ submodule together with the generated governance files.

Read the core standards, starting with CONSTITUTION.md and AI_WORKFLOW.md. Standards Overview summarizes the full set.
Fill in the recommended documents under docs/ (TEST_PLAN.md, OTS_SOFTWARE.md, ENV_VARS.md, and the rest) as they become relevant.
Turn on the CI governance checks, which start in warn-only mode. See Governance Checkers for what each one enforces and when to move it to --strict.