---
title: "Scenario: Cratis maintainer"
description: "Contribute to Cratis own repositories - the cratis-engineering plugin for general conventions, product-local skills for product depth."
---

You contribute to Cratis' own repositories (Chronicle, Arc, Fundamentals,
Components, …) rather than building an application on them.

## What you do

1. Install the maintainer plugin from the same marketplace — for Claude Code:

   ```text
   /plugin marketplace add Cratis/AI
   /plugin install cratis-engineering@cratis
   ```

   Other hosts follow the same pattern (see the
   [agent harness guide](/ai/harnesses/)). The `cratis-engineering` plugin
   carries the general engineering skills: C# house conventions, the
   decision-record procedure, the effect-boundary failure contract, and shared
   documentation authoring guidance. The profile side is split by language —
   subscribe to the cell for the language your repository writes
   (`cratis/engineering/csharp`, `cratis/engineering/typescript`, …) so you
   load that language's conventions and the shared procedures rather than
   every language at once.

2. Start your agent from the repository root so it reads that repository's
   `AGENTS.md` and its own local rules first. Cratis repositories carry their
   own repository-local skills for product-specific contributor guidance —
   for example the Chronicle repository carries its kernel-tracing procedure
   locally, because that guidance only makes sense inside Chronicle.

3. Keep private overlays local. Confidential or repository-specific behavior
   lives in the product repository (`.agents/skills/`, `.cratis/PROJECT.md`),
   never in the shared profile.

## What you get

- The general Cratis engineering conventions in every harness you use.
- A clean upstream path: generalize and remove private facts before proposing
  a change to `Cratis/AI`; improvements flow one way through issues or pull
  requests.

## When you don't need this

If you only build applications *on* Cratis, you want the public `cratis`
plugin, not this one. The single `cratis/engineering` profile replaced the
former per-product engineering profiles: product-specific contributor guidance
now belongs to the owning product repository.

See [Using AI as a Cratis maintainer](/ai/cratis-maintainers/) for the full
maintainer workflow. The `@cratis/ai-engineering` package is not published
yet — today the maintainer skills arrive via the marketplace plugin that
follows the `Cratis/AI` default branch.