Contributing to BaseCoat

BaseCoat grows through contributions from teams who discover patterns worth sharing.

What to contribute

Good contributions are patterns that:

• Solve a problem that applies to multiple teams, not one project
• Are actionable — Copilot can follow them without ambiguity
• Contain no org-specific details — product names, internal URLs, team names
• Have been validated in at least one real session

Contribution types

Type	Where	Template
Agent	agents/<name>.agent.md	See existing agent for format
Skill	skills/<name>/SKILL.md	See existing skill for format
Instruction	instructions/<name>.instructions.md	frontmatter + rules
Memory	Via submit-learning-callable.yml workflow	JSON payload

Required file structure

Agent (agents/<name>.agent.md)

---
name: agent-name
description: One-sentence description.
---

Required sections: ## Inputs, ## Workflow, ## Output

Skill (skills/<name>/SKILL.md)

---
name: skill-name
description: One-sentence description.
---

Required sections: ## Triggers, ## Inputs, ## Workflow, ## Output, ## Examples

Instruction (instructions/<name>.instructions.md)

---
description: What this instruction enforces.
applyTo: path/pattern/**
---

Submitting

1. Fork or branch from main
2. Add your asset following the structure above
3. Run validation: pwsh scripts/validate-basecoat.ps1
4. Run tests: pwsh tests/run-tests.ps1
5. Open a PR — the Squad agent will triage it

Memory contributions

Short-lived patterns (session fixes, workarounds) go through the memory contribution workflow rather than direct PRs. Use the memory-promoter agent to identify candidates, then call submit-learning-callable.yml.