Agentic software engineering (ASE) template repository

The purpose of this repository is to serve as a public template for agentic software engineering (ASE) developed at Ascend.io. We use a variety of tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, and GitHub Copilot to assist in the software development process. This repository is designed to be a starting point for teams looking to implement ASE practices in their own projects.

What?

Common context to be included in all agentic sessions are centralized in the AGENTS.md file. Tool-specific files are then symlinked or copied from this AGENTS.md file.

Structure

What	How	Why
AGENTS.md	Central context file	Single source of truth for agent instructions
CLAUDE.md	Symlinked from AGENTS.md	Claude Code specific context
GEMINI.md	Symlinked from AGENTS.md	Gemini CLI specific context
.github/copilot-instructions.md	Symlinked from AGENTS.md	GitHub Copilot specific context
.cursor/rules/common.mdc	Copied from AGENTS.md via bin/cursor_rules.sh	Cursor editor rules with required frontmatter
bin/	Executable utility scripts	Direct execution of bash/Python utilities
prompts/	Durable context files as Markdown	Reusable prompt templates and context
tasks/	Ephemeral development task files	Temporary task documentation
src/	Source code directory	Main application code

Why?

Standards are hard [obligatory xkcd here]. Nobody agrees on the files -- nor even the extension -- to use for their ASE tooling. So, over time we settled on the root agent context file with some additional structure.

Getting started

Clone this repository, then:

./bin/setup.sh

This will install uv and setup pre-commit hooks.