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type: adr id: adr-0074 status: accepted created: 2026-06-13 updated: 2026-06-13

ADR-0074 — The repo family realized: producer workspace and skills catalog

Context

ADR-0073 named the multi-repo workspace and noted that the corpus family's own was "a separate owner action." The owner acted: a corpus-works repo now exists for the family (corpus · corpus-cli · corpus-skills · planned: corpus-starter-kit, corpus-ci, corpus-website). Until now this repo carried its own producer workspace (.agents/specs|audits|change-plans) and two skill surfaces beyond the kit core (the kit's advanced/ guides; docs/library/code-skills/), and corpus-cli carried a full co-located workspace. The repo-split audit (now at corpus-works:specs/repo-split-architecture/audit.md) states the governing principle: corpus is canon; every other repo is derived, implemented, or indexed from it — and a producer workspace inside the product repo ships planning clutter to the adopters and the CLI that consume it.

Decision

1. The producer workspace is corpus-works — the family's multi-repo workspace (the ADR-0073 shape applied to corpus itself). Specs, audits, research, change plans, findings, tasks, reviews, and the board for changes to this repo and to corpus-cli live there. This repo and corpus-cli carry the code-repo footprint (the workspace pointer, the gitignore lines, the implement-task guide) — nothing else. Accepted framework decisions still land here, in docs/adrs/; corpus-works is not a second canon.
2. The optional guides are a catalog: corpus-skills. The kit's advanced/ guides and the per-change-shape implementation guides (formerly docs/library/code-skills/) move to the corpus-skills repo in the Agent Skills format (skills/<name>/SKILL.md), installable piecemeal (npx skills add jcosta33/corpus-skills) or by copying folders. The kit keeps the three core guides; starter-kit/advanced/ keeps the optional templates and the two reference cards and points at the catalog for guides. docs/library/ is retired.
3. The dev subset shrinks to implementation-side guides. .agents/skills/ keeps implement-task (byte-identical kit mirror), empirical-proof, and persona-documentarian. The authoring, review, and persona guides move to corpus-works's skills as workspace-adapted copies — spec writing, reviewing, and auditing for this repo run from the workspace.

Alternatives considered

• Keep the producer workspace co-located — the dogfooding default, but this repo is not a normal adopter: its product is copied wholesale by adopters and consumed by the CLI, so producer artifacts pollute the product surface; the audit's observation 2 makes the boundary explicit.
• Per-repo full installs across the family — rejected by ADR-0073 Decision 6: one full workspace, footprints in code repos, no install in derived-content repos.
• Advanced guides stay in the kit — every adopter carries guides they do not need, and the catalog cannot grow without growing every workspace copy; the kit stays core-only, the catalog installs piecemeal.
• A corpus-linter repo — rejected; record-level checks belong in corpus-cli (corpus spec check), per the audit and ADR-0058's notation-not-language framing.

Consequences

Accepted. Refines ADR-0064 (minimal kit tiering — the optional tier's guides now distribute via the catalog; the tier's templates and cards stay in the kit), ADR-0069 (kit contents unchanged in shape; the advanced directory's guide subfolders leave), and ADR-0073 (the family's own multi-repo workspace exists). The propagation surfaces — docs/01/03/05/07/08, ADOPTING, agent-guides, review-stances, advanced-lifecycle, kit README, advanced README, the skills manifest, this repo's AGENTS.md — now point at the workspace and the catalog. corpus-cli's uninstall is recorded in its own history.

Propagation

AGENTS.md (workspace pointer, pointers, single-sourcing), docs/01, docs/03, docs/05, docs/07, docs/08, docs/ADOPTING.md, docs/reference/{agent-guides, review-stances, advanced-lifecycle}, starter-kit/README.md, starter-kit/advanced/README.md, .agents/SKILLS-MANIFEST.md, ledger row.