The projects are maintained with an AI assistant as a working member of the team, so how that assistant operates a repository is itself a standard. Two rules were being rediscovered project by project and are now inherited by every node. The canonical machine copy is in the repository at hub/standards/agent-tooling.md.

The rules

1. Use PowerShell and the file tools, not the sandbox. On this Windows environment the Cowork bash sandbox is actively unreliable rather than merely redundant: it has returned stale and truncated file reads, failed to touch .git, and mangled line endings badly enough to stage thousands of phantom changes. All shell work goes through PowerShell on the real machine; all file work goes through the editor tools.

2. Do the work, don’t hand over a script. The assistant executes the change — builds, verifies, commits — rather than producing instructions for the user to run. A script handed over is unverified work.

Line-ending hygiene

Each repository carries a .gitattributes that normalises line endings, so a formatter run after a dependency upgrade doesn’t drown the working tree in CRLF noise. This is what keeps the dependencies standard’s “upgrade aggressively” practical.