What it does
setup-coding-standards is the wizard that gets a repository started with the coding-standards system: it surveys what’s already in place, asks where the generic standards should live, and scaffolds CODING_STANDARDS/CODING_STANDARDS.md plus the surrounding structure. It scaffolds the routing structure only — the standards themselves come later, distilled from your own review history, so it never writes a single rule.
The one decision it puts to you is placement of the generic layer, one of three: machine-global (inside the apply-coding-standards skill in a machine-wide skill home, shared by every repo on your machine), repo-local (inside that skill vendored in the project’s own skills directory, committed and canonical for the repo), or standalone (everything under the repo’s CODING_STANDARDS/, reading no skill home at all). The choice is recorded in the entry file’s ## Setup section, so every later skill run reads it instead of re-asking. Project-specific standards live in the repo in all three.
When to reach for it
- Invocation mode. You invoke this by typing
/setup-coding-standards— the agent won’t reach for it on its own. - Trigger boundary. Reach for it once per repo, before the first distill-coding-standards run or when adopting standards distilled elsewhere. To check code against standards that are already set up, use apply-coding-standards instead.
The structure it scaffolds
Everything hangs off two-level routing: an entry file (CODING_STANDARDS/CODING_STANDARDS.md) points at per-folder maps, each map points at its topic docs, so an agent loads only what a change needs. The wizard creates the entry, the template, a pointer line in the repo’s agent instructions, and a .gitignore line for distill’s dossier (raw mining data stays out of version control) — and deliberately no empty topic folders, because folders are distill’s to create as docs earn them.
It’s working if
CODING_STANDARDS/CODING_STANDARDS.mdexists at the repo root and every link inside it resolves.- The repo’s agent instructions (CLAUDE.md or equivalent) point at it.
- No standards content was invented — the structure is ready but empty until distill fills it.
Where it fits
The run-once setup step of the coding-standards chain: /setup-coding-standards scaffolds, distill-coding-standards fills the structure from review history, validate-distilled-coding-standards proves the distillation works, apply-coding-standards reads it while coding, review-with-coding-standards reviews PRs against it, and amend-coding-standards edits one rule at a time. For the map of the whole set, see ask-eddy.