Cratis AI concepts
The Cratis AI pages use a small set of terms. This page defines them in one place.
| Concept | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Corpus | The shared rules, skills, prompts, agents, hooks, and harness assets. It is authored in Cratis/AI and installed into a repository under .cratis/ai. |
| Configuration | .cratis/ai.json, the repository’s own record of which harnesses, profiles, and languages it selected. It has no version field. |
| Profile | A named selection. cratis/application/* profiles are for building applications on Cratis, cratis/engineering/* for contributing to the framework, cratis/documentation for documentation. Product profiles such as cratis/arc select skills for one product. See Choose Cratis AI profiles. |
| Rule | Standing guidance the harness loads without being asked. Some rules apply to every file; others are scoped to paths such as **/*.cs. |
| Skill | A folder with a SKILL.md and optional references that the agent loads when a task matches. Cratis skill names start with cratis-, for example cratis-arc-command. |
| Prompt | A slash command that starts a workflow, such as new-vertical-slice or add-projection. |
| Agent | A subagent definition, such as a spec writer or a security reviewer, that a harness with subagent support can delegate to. |
| Managed manifest | .cratis/ai.manifest.json, which records the corpus source revision and every Cratis-installed file and harness integration with its hash. |
| Harness | The coding tool that runs the agent: Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenCode, or Pi. |
| Harness adapter | A native path such as .claude/skills, .cursor/rules, .pi/extensions, or AGENTS.md that points into .cratis/ai, usually as a symbolic link. |
| Native plugin | A single-harness install that bypasses the CLI: the cratis marketplace plugin (skills only) or the @cratis/pi npm package. |
The repository owns its configuration and every file it adds. The installer
owns only the paths listed in the managed manifest. A file it did not install is
never claimed or overwritten, even with --force; if such a file is in the way,
the run reports a conflict and changes nothing.
Use Start using Cratis AI for the managed workflow and the agent harness guide to compare native plugins.