handbooks/README.md

# Handbooks

Instance-agnostic reference material for coding agents — the verbose, citable kind that belongs in
a retrieval store, not in a skill.

## What goes here

- Public standards, style guides, and conventions that apply regardless of which box or project is
  running — general git operations, language style guides, CERT/MISRA-style rulebooks.
- Long-form and specific. A handbook can be as detailed as it needs to be; nothing here is loaded
  into a model's context wholesale, so length carries no per-turn tax.

## What does not go here

- **Anything specific to one machine or one project.** A local Gitea's branch-naming rule, this
  box's PR checklist — that's instance-bound and belongs in that project's own KB corpus instead
  (the `engineering` corpus, for
  [halogen](https://git.novoyuuparosk.org/mikkeli/halogen-workstation-roadmap)).
- **Short, prescriptive procedures achievable within a context window or two.** That's a skill, not
  a handbook — it gets loaded, not retrieved. See `skills/` in the halogen-workstation-roadmap repo
  for the sibling convention.
- **The retrieval store itself.** This repo holds the source-of-truth markdown a human has vouched
  for. The chunked, embedded index built from it is derived and rebuildable state — it lives beside
  whichever KB is consuming it, never committed here.

## Format

One markdown file per topic at the repo root. Each file should stand as a single admittable
document — the same shape a human vouches for at KB admission time.

## Ingesting a handbook

Markdown needs no conversion and no extraction verifier — admit it straight from this repo:

```bash
index.py admit ~/dev/handbooks/git-operations.md --corpus engineering \
  --vouch mikkeli --title 'Git operations' --collection dev-practice \
  --version "$(git -C ~/dev/handbooks rev-parse --short HEAD)"
```

Without `--title` the document is titled by its filename, which is what a retrieval hit then shows.
`--collection` is a flat cluster tag; getting it wrong costs recall and nothing else.

⚠ **`--version` is this repo's commit, and it is the one that matters.** Re-admitting replaces a
document outright with no version history, so the pin is the only record of which revision a chunk
reflects.

⚠ **Editing a file here does not update the corpus.** Re-admission is deliberate, because the vouch
is a claim about a specific version of a document.

## Status

Started 2026-08-21. First handbook, `git-operations.md`, composed 2026-08-21 – 2026-08-22: branching,
committing, merging vs. rebasing, reverting and undoing, remotes and collaboration, tags and releases.
Confirmed ingestible 2026-08-22 — 30 chunks, heading paths intact, retrieved correctly.