Packs and templates

Compose ordered, reusable instruction sets without flattening your source organization.

Templates control document structure. Packs contribute reusable content to named slots and may enable skills. Profiles and scopes select an ordered list of packs.

Template families

A template family can specialize by harness:

templates/software/
├── default.md
├── codex.md
└── claude-code.md

For each harness, agentsmith chooses <harness>.md when present and otherwise uses default.md.

# Working agreement

## Tools

<!-- agentsmith:slot tools -->

## Verification

<!-- agentsmith:required-slot verification -->

Pack contributions

Pack snippets are grouped by the slot they fill:

packs/bun/
└── instructions/
    ├── tools/
    │   └── 10-bun.md
    └── codex/
        └── verification/
            └── 20-codex.md

Common snippets apply to every harness. Harness-specific snippets are appended after common snippets for that pack. Pack selection order comes first; paths within each pack sort lexically, so numeric filename prefixes make the intended order visible.

The directory itself defines an instruction-only pack. Add pack.toml only when the pack should enable skills:

skills = ["bun-debug"]

The manifest accepts only the optional skills field.

Skills use a parallel but consumer-agnostic layout:

packs/github/
└── skill-slots/
    └── tracker/
        └── 10-github.md

Every enabled skill declaring tracker receives that snippet. The pack does not name the skills that consume it. See Create a composable skill for the complete workflow.

Source IDs

Unqualified IDs are the normal form:

template = "software"
packs = ["base", "bun"]

During project generation, templates, skills, and partials resolve from the project first, then the shared Source Repository. Matching packs merge additively, shared first and project second. Use a qualifier only to require one owner:

template = "source:software"
packs = ["base", "project:deploy"]

Missing sources are errors. asmith project explain shows each selected pack’s canonical owner, path, and composition order.

Additive only

Packs do not depend on, conflict with, or suppress other packs in v1. Select logical pack names in the desired order; matching shared and project packs compose automatically. This keeps configuration explainable and makes repeated generation deterministic.