Your coding agent shouldn’t have to guess how you build software.
529 documents of principles, guidelines, ingredients and recipes — written to be read by an agent before it writes a line of code, and by you when you want to know why it did what it did.
- 529 documents
- 8 sections
- MIT licensed
A style guide is written for people who will forget it. This one is written to be applied.
Standards documents fail in the same way every time: the knowledge is real, and it is somewhere nobody is when the decision gets made. The cookbook is the same knowledge, in a shape an agent can pick up at the moment it matters.
A standards doc
Describes what good looks like.
- A page in the wiki, linked once during onboarding
- Prose that has to be read, remembered, and interpreted
- No way to tell which rules apply to which platform
- Advice with no address — you cannot cite paragraph four
- Reviewed at review time, if the reviewer remembers
The cookbook
Is read, cited, and checked against.
- Structured so an agent can load exactly the parts that apply
- Every document has a stable domain id, so specs cite each other
- Frontmatter carries status, version and platforms — filterable
- Recipes specify behavior down to keyboard shortcuts and empty states
- A compliance section of checks that run, not promises to be careful
Four layers, each one narrower than the last.
Every document sits on exactly one rung. That is what lets an agent start at the top for a judgment call and drop to the bottom for a spec, without you having to explain which is which.
- Principles
- How to think. Foundational ideas that survive a change of language, framework, and decade. They settle the arguments the layers below never have to have again. 45 documents.
- Guidelines
- What the rules are. Principles turned into rules you can be held to, organized by topic — testing, security, UI, networking, data. Each one is checkable. 352 documents.
- Ingredients
- The building blocks. Single-concern specs for one component or one pattern. Small enough to be right, and to be reused without dragging a whole feature along behind them. 21 documents.
- Recipes
- The finished dish. Ingredients composed into a whole feature: selection behavior, keyboard shortcuts, empty states, and how it should look on each platform. 25 documents.
Below all four sits Compliance: 17 automated checks for accessibility, security, privacy, performance and platform rules — the part that decides whether the work is actually done, rather than asking whether it feels done.
You describe the panel. Everything else was already decided.
You’re building a file browser panel. You open Claude Code and just start describing what you want — lazy loading, git status badges, ignore patterns. That’s it. That’s all you say.
Before a single line of code is written, Claude reads 45 engineering principles, walks you through a guideline checklist — accessibility, keyboard navigation, progress indicators — and finds a recipe that already specifies everything: selection behavior, keyboard shortcuts, empty states, platform-specific appearance across Swift, Kotlin, TypeScript, and C#. All the things you would have eventually gotten around to thinking about. Already thought about.
You approve it. Implementation begins in three phases — make it work, make it right, make it fast. No shortcuts, no “we’ll add accessibility later.” When it’s done, the guideline checklist is green, the recipe is fully satisfied, and the tests pass. The file browser your users deserve, not the file browser you would have settled for.
You didn’t have to remember any of it. That’s the cookbook.
Eight sections. Start anywhere.
Every one of them is a real page with real documents behind it — nothing here is a placeholder waiting to be written.
Projects
Self-contained, platform-agnostic project definitions. The source of truth from which native code is generated.
Principles
Foundational ideas that guide all technical decisions. How to think about engineering.
Ingredients
Atomic component and pattern specs. Single-concern building blocks for UI, data, and infrastructure.
Compliance
Automated checks for accessibility, security, privacy, performance, and platform compliance.
One chapter of a bigger story.
Dev Team
Multi-agent development pipeline. Specialists analyze, build, and verify your code.
Official Agent Registry
Curated directory of production-ready agents, skills, and MCP servers.
The Cookbook is one chapter of a bigger story — everything your AI agents need to become real software, from the Agentic Developer Hub. Next in the story: the Agentic Developer Toolkit.
The things people ask first.
Is this a library I install?
No. There is nothing to add to a manifest. The cookbook is a body of documents — you read them, and you point your coding agent at them, in this site or in the repository. What it changes is what your agent knows before it starts, not what your build produces.
Which languages and platforms does it cover?
Swift, Kotlin, TypeScript, C# and Python, targeting macOS, iOS, Windows and the web. Most documents are deliberately platform-agnostic; the ones that are not declare their platforms in frontmatter, and the filter in the header narrows any section down to the ones you actually ship on.
Do I have to adopt all of it?
No, and it is not built on the assumption that you will. Every document is addressable on its own — it has a stable id, its own URL, and its own version — so a single guideline or one recipe is a perfectly ordinary thing to use. The layers exist so you can take a rung without taking the ladder.
How do I know a document is current?
Each one carries its version, status and last-modified date, and shows them at the end of the page. Status is one of accepted, review, draft or deprecated, and anything that is not accepted says so on the card as well as on the page — so a draft can be published without it quietly passing for settled.
What is a “project”?
A self-contained, platform-agnostic definition of what an application is — the source of truth that generation tools turn into native code for a given platform. It has a published JSON Schema, so a project file can be validated rather than believed. The format is documented here.
Is it free?
MIT licensed, and the source is public. Fork it, cut it down to the parts you want, or keep your house rules in the same shape alongside it — the repository is on GitHub.
You didn’t have to remember any of it. It is all in here.
529 documents, free and MIT licensed. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for — just start reading.