Templates

A template decides what your context space looks like on day one, and how a new AI client gets wired. Both kinds live in one place: contextverse-templates (Apache-2.0).

Context-space templates

contextd template list                          # browse the catalog
contextd init solo --template team-engineering  # start from one
contextd space seed --template <name> --force   # re-seed an existing space

contextd init offers the catalog during setup, with a description for each entry, so you rarely need template list by hand.

Template	Best for
solo-default	Individual use. The canonical space model — start here if unsure.
team-engineering	An engineering squad: shared standards, multiple projects, ADRs
devops-platform	DevOps / SRE / platform: systems map and change discipline
product-startup	Founders and early product: bets, users, pivots
client-engagement	Consultants and agencies: per-client isolation

Every template carries a TEMPLATE.md explaining who it is for and why it is shaped the way it is. Read that rather than the file list — the reasoning is the useful part.

Re-seeding keeps your identity

contextd space seed rewrites the template files but leaves identity/me.md alone. That file is seeded once and then belongs to you.

Client-integration templates

These teach contextd how to detect an AI client and where to put its session-start context. Adding support for a new AI tool is a pull request to the templates repository — not a release of the binary.

contextd plugin list       # what is known, and what is detected here
contextd plugin install    # wire the detected ones
contextd plugin refresh    # fetch the latest community integrations

The well-known clients ship embedded in the binary, so contextd works offline; the catalog adds to them, and embedded IDs win on conflict.

What contextd writes, per client

Client	Slot	Nature
Claude Code	SessionStart hook in settings.json	Live — re-reads the space every session
Cursor	.cursor/rules/contextverse.mdc	Snapshot, refreshed on activate
Windsurf	.windsurfrules	Snapshot
GitHub Copilot	.github/copilot-instructions.md	Snapshot
opencode	AGENTS.md, marked block	Snapshot; your own content preserved
MCP clients	contextd mcp serve over stdio	Live tools
ChatGPT, other web UIs	— none —	contextd export --format chatgpt, manual upload

Files contextd shares with you

Some slots are dedicated files that belong entirely to contextd, and it rewrites them wholesale. Others — AGENTS.md above all — you wrote yourself, and other tools read them too. For those, contextd owns only a delimited block:

Your own instructions, untouched.

<!-- >>> contextverse >>> -->
…generated pointer to your space…
<!-- <<< contextverse <<< -->

More of your own text, also untouched.

Re-running activate replaces that block rather than appending another copy. If the opening marker is present without its closing one, contextd refuses and asks you to fix it — guessing where your text resumed is how content gets eaten.

Writing your own

Both kinds are directories of files with one YAML manifest, and both require a human-readable rationale file — TEMPLATE.md or INTEGRATION.md. A pull request without one is rejected, because six months later nobody can tell why the template is shaped the way it is.

The full schema, the mechanism and merge-strategy tables, and the honesty rule for stating a client's real ceiling are in the templates repository README.