The fastest way to make the agent work the way you work is to write down what’s true about your environment and how you want things done. Rumus exposes two complementary tools for that:Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://www.rumus.ai/docs/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
- Rules — short, always-on guidance the agent reads with every prompt.
- Skills — named, on-demand procedures the agent invokes when relevant.
Rules
A rule is a short bit of plain text that the agent treats as part of its system prompt. Use rules for facts and preferences that should apply every time:- “Use
pnpmnotnpmin this repo.” - “Never run destructive commands without confirming, even if whitelisted.”
- “All production hosts are in
us-east;us-westhosts are staging.” - “Default to writing tests in Vitest, not Jest.”
Add a rule
The rule applies to every new agent message from that point on. Existing in-flight tool calls aren’t affected.
Tips for writing good rules
- Be specific. “Be careful with prod” doesn’t help. “Never run
rm -rfagainst any host whose name containsprod” does. - Frame as facts when possible. Rules that describe how things are generalize better than rules that describe what to do.
- Keep them short. Rules that bloat into paragraphs become noise; the agent ignores them. A few crisp lines beats a wall of text.
- Audit regularly. When a rule no longer reflects your environment, disable or delete it.
Skills
A skill is a named, self-contained procedure. Each skill has:- A name (e.g.
deploy-staging). - A description of when to use it.
- An instruction body — the actual step-by-step procedure, in your words.
When to write a skill
If you’re repeatedly explaining the same multi-step procedure to the agent — turn it into a skill. Common candidates:- Deployments — “deploy the staging environment”, “promote staging to production”.
- Health checks — “check whether the queue worker is healthy on
prod-worker-*”. - Diagnostic flows — “investigate a 502 on the API: check logs, then upstream, then load balancer”.
- Code conventions — “set up a new feature module: scaffold, register in router, add tests”.
Add a skill
Click New skill
Fill in:
- Name — short, identifier-like (
deploy-staging). - Description — one sentence describing when the agent should use it.
- Instruction — the actual procedure, written as steps.
Writing the instruction body
Pretend you’re writing a runbook for a colleague:How rules and skills sync
Both rules and skills are part of your AI settings, which sync to the cloud as part of config sync. Edit a skill on your laptop and it shows up on your desktop after the next sync. They’re not part of the vault — they’re treated as configuration, not credentials, since they’re guidance text rather than secrets. Don’t put credentials in a rule or skill; reference saved keychains and accounts instead.Soft delete
Deleting a rule or skill is a tombstone — it’s marked deleted and synced as such, so deletion propagates across your devices. If you accidentally delete one, restore it from local sync state before the next push.Tips
- One responsibility per skill. Resist the temptation to write
do-everything-deployskills; small composable skills are easier for the agent to chain. - Name skills to read like verbs.
deploy-stagingreads naturally in a prompt;staging-deployment-proceduredoesn’t. - Use rules for facts, skills for procedures. “
prod-*hosts run Ubuntu 22.04” is a rule. “How to roll a kernel upgrade onprod-*” is a skill. - Audit your skills when you change tools. A skill that references the old build system is technical debt the agent will faithfully use.
Next steps
Plan mode
Plans frequently invoke skills as individual steps.
Conversation management
Auto-naming, summarization, and task lists.