Agent Support

Reporails recognizes the instruction-file conventions of five coding agents and runs the rules that match the files actually present in your repo. Each agent has its own root config plus optional rule / skill / sub-agent directories and (where the agent supports them) hook and MCP config files.

Recognized agents

Many agents intentionally read each other's directories — Cursor's skills column, for example, includes .claude/skills/ and .codex/skills/ because Cursor invokes skills regardless of which agent first authored them. The cells above show the most common project-level patterns; user-level and system-level patterns are also recognized — see What gets scanned.

How agent detection works

Reporails auto-detects which agents are present by checking for their marker files (Claude → CLAUDE.md, Codex → AGENTS.md plus a .codex/ marker, Cursor → .cursor/ directory, etc.). If your project has both CLAUDE.md and .cursorrules, both Claude and Cursor rule sets fire. If only one marker is present, only that agent's rules fire.

You can override detection with --agent:

ails check --agent claude    # only Claude-scoped rules
ails check --agent cursor    # only Cursor-scoped rules

Or pin a default in .ails/config.yml:

default_agent: claude

Multi-agent projects

When multiple agents share a base file (e.g., Codex, Cursor, and Gemini all read AGENTS.md), Reporails fires both the agent-specific rules and the cross-agent compatibility rules. Three CORE rules are specifically about cross-agent coexistence:

• CORE:C:0026 Cross Agent Compatibility — flags directives that are correct for one agent but break another
• CORE:C:0046 Same-Topic Reinforcement and Conflict — catches the same topic being reinforced or contradicted across agent files
• CORE:S:0012 Agent Documents Filenames — checks that filenames match the agent's expected conventions

Disable any of these in your project config if your monorepo deliberately keeps agent-specific text in shared files — see Configuration → Disabling rules.

What gets scanned

For every recognized agent, Reporails resolves files at three scopes:

• Project — files inside your repository (e.g., CLAUDE.md, .claude/rules/**/*.md)
• User — files in your home directory (~/.claude/, ~/.cursor/, ~/.codex/, etc.) that the agent itself loads at session start
• System / managed — platform-specific managed-config paths (/etc/..., /Library/Application Support/..., C:/ProgramData/...)

The user and system scopes are part of your instruction system because the agent reads them at session start regardless of which directory you launched from. If you keep sensitive content in ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, it is included in the analysis payload to the same degree as CLAUDE.md in your repo (see FAQ → Is my instruction file ever stored for what actually leaves your machine).

Hooks and settings written in JSON are validated against the documented schema for each agent — type fields, event-name casing, required keys. Mistakes that would silently fail (a misspelled PreToolUse event, a prompt-type hook in an agent that only supports command) are flagged.

Cross-agent rules

A subset of rules apply regardless of which agent you use:

• File size limits (CORE:E:0001, CORE:E:0002)
• Heading hierarchy and structural integrity
• Reinforcement patterns ("must" / "never" / specific over generic)
• Credential and secret handling
• Cross-file consistency (CORE:C:0026, CORE:C:0046)
• Filename conventions (CORE:S:0012)
• ... and many more covering specificity, brevity, formatting, frontmatter integrity, and other dimensions — browse the full set at reporails.com/rules

These rules carry the prefix CORE: and fire whenever any recognized instruction file exists, regardless of which agents are detected.

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