Supported harnesses¶

ai-rulez ships 52 built-in presets, one per AI coding harness. The table below lists them; ai-rulez init also writes the list into a comment in the new config.toml. Each preset writes the harness's own layout: file names, frontmatter, directories and settings documents. For a harness that is not listed, use a provider-backed custom preset.

The shared mcp preset (the root .mcp.json) is not a harness and is not in the table.

Feature matrix¶

yes means the preset writes that output at project level. - means it does not; the reason is under Skipped features. Terms:

• Rules: a native rules folder. - means rules are inlined into the root instructions file.
• Commands: slash commands. A command is written as a skill where the harness has no command folder (codex, antigravity, devin, warp) and as a prompt or workflow file for copilot, pi, cline and kiro (.kiro/prompts). claude still reads .claude/commands, but ai-rulez writes commands there as user-invocable skills, because Claude Code merges the two.
• Hooks and Perms (permissions): yes renders into a project file, user renders only with generate --user because the vendor reads them from the user configuration only. See Hooks, permissions and settings keys and Permissions.
• Checks: code-review guidelines.
• User: supported by generate --user; see User-level configuration for the paths.

Where each output lands (file names, merged documents, user-level paths) is in the preset's provider spec under internal/generator/providers/builtin/<preset>.toml and, for the Go presets (antigravity, baz, cline, codex, copilot, cursor, devin, gemini, opencode, xum), in internal/generator/presets/. The user-level table is in User-level configuration.

Cross-cutting behavior¶

• Shared outputs. Presets that write the same path (AGENTS.md, .agents/skills/, the root .mcp.json) must render identical bytes. generate fails and names the presets when they diverge, except for an AGENTS.md that omits rules because its harness reads them from a rules folder; the complete file is kept with a warning. See AGENTS.md and .agents/skills.
• Merged documents. Settings files that hold your own keys (.claude/settings.json, opencode.json, .codex/config.toml, .qwen/settings.json, ...) are merged, not replaced. ai-rulez owns the keys, array elements and map members it writes, and comments in JSONC, TOML and YAML survive. See Settings document merge behavior.
• Native MCP environment references. Where the harness expands ${VAR}-style references itself, the reference is written instead of the secret. See Environment references.
• Native tool and model names. Frontmatter is translated to each harness's own tool names, and bare Claude model aliases (sonnet, opus, haiku) are dropped where the harness has no such model.

Skipped features¶

A missing feature is a deliberate skip, with the reason taken from the provider spec or the settings and permissions docs. Nothing is approximated.

Instructions, rules, skills and agents¶

Hooks¶

Sixteen presets generate no [[hooks]]: aiassistant, baz, codebuff, codewhale, dsh, muse, omp, openclaw, replit, rovodev, takt, trae, warp, xum, zed and zoocode. A preset without hook support is named in one generate warning; ai-rulez emits no hook it could not read from the vendor's documentation.

user in the matrix marks harnesses whose vendor reads hooks (or permissions) only from the user configuration: junie ("ignores project hooks"), zcode (ignores project hooks), hermes, kimi (user config.toml only) and, for permissions, zed. They render with generate --user. Per-harness event, matcher and timeout details are in Hooks, permissions and settings keys.

Permissions¶

These harnesses have no documented, committable permission file that can express [permissions], so they get nothing from it and generate names them in a warning (from Permissions):

Every other preset without a yes or user in the Perms column has no permission surface in its provider spec.

Checks¶

Only eight harnesses read code-review guidelines from a repository file: amp, augment, cursor, factory, gitlab-duo, kilo, qwen and rovodev. Not generated: Augment area grouping and per-area globs, GitLab fileFilters, Takt quality gates, Hermes pre-verify specs, and JetBrains AI Assistant (its self-review path is a per-user IDE setting). See Checks.

User scope¶

aiassistant, baz, codebuff, replit and xum have no documented user-level location for anything generate --user writes and are reported and skipped. codebuff has only an MCP file, which user scope does not generate. User-level MCP servers are never generated.