Templates and Examples

Templates and Examples

Templates

templates/ is the payload scripts/bootstrap.sh installs into an adopting repository. Notable groups:

• Agent-instruction bridges — AGENTS.md (the cross-vendor default), plus opt-in vendor files (CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, .goosehints, .openhands_instructions, .project-rules.md, SYSTEM_PROMPT.md, and others) installed only for the tools a project actually uses.
• Project governance files — AGENTS.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, HELP.md, README.md, SECURITY.md, TODO.md, CHANGELOG.md, and VERSION. The README template is the worked example of DOCUMENTATION.md's README expectations: a visible capabilities list and quick start, one collapsed install block per platform (Windows, macOS, Linux), and a collapsed project tree.
• Documentation scaffolds under templates/docs/ — SETUP.md, COMMAND_REFERENCE.md, TROUBLESHOOTING.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, OPERATIONS.md, TEST_PLAN.md, PRODUCT_REQUIREMENTS.md, REQUIREMENTS_TRACEABILITY.md, OTS_SOFTWARE.md (now with a License column), ENV_VARS.md, MEMORY.md, SESSION_PLAN.md, AGENT_HANDOFF.md, INCIDENT_POSTMORTEM.md, and MVP_BACKLOG.md.
• Demo page — templates/demo.html, a working single-file page (inline styles and scripts, no build, no backend, no network) that product-facing repositories fill in and publish. See DOCUMENTATION.md's "Demo Page" and docs/adr/0002-demo-page-requirement.md.
• GitHub automation under templates/.github/ — Copilot instructions, Dependabot configuration (submodule and SHA-pinned GitHub Actions), the Solon agent, a pull_request_template.md carrying the Completion Checklist and the trivial-change declaration, a commented CODEOWNERS example, and the constitution-*.yml workflow templates (including constitution-wiki.yml; see Home). Every action in every workflow is pinned by full commit SHA (SECURITY.md, "CI/CD Supply Chain").
• Agent runtime guardrails — templates/.claude/settings.json (installed with --agents=claude) carries a permissions.deny list that refuses sudo, deleting / or ~, force/mirror/delete pushes, and branch or tag deletion, and refuses to read credential-shaped files. It is a prefix-matched floor, not a guarantee; see SECURITY.md, "Agent Runtime Security".
• Incident postmortems — templates/docs/INCIDENT_POSTMORTEM.md, copied per incident into docs/incidents/, with corrective actions that become TODO.md items (OPERATIONS.md, "Incident Response").

A template is a starting point, not a finished document. check_compliance.sh flags recommended and product-facing docs that still hold copied placeholder text, so adoption is not "done" until each template has been customized or trimmed to describe the real repository. demo.html is checked the same way but by a different signal: HTML comments are ordinary markup rather than template prompts, so the scaffold carries an explicit constitution-demo-template-placeholder marker that the adopter deletes.

Example project

examples/sample-project/ demonstrates the shape a bootstrapped repository is expected to have: top-level governance docs, a constitution/ submodule, a docs/ directory, src/, and editor/assistant configuration directories such as .github/ and .cursor/.

examples/OPERATIONS.example.md is a fully worked operations runbook for a fictional deployed service, filling in every section docs/OPERATIONS.md is expected to cover.

See also

• Bootstrap Script
• Standards Overview
• MCP Server