Coding Fundamentals

This project is retired. The repo remains archived on GitHub so existing links keep working, but I no longer maintain it. For the same fundamentals as an actively maintained, community-scale skill set, use Matt Pocock's skills instead—built by the person whose talk inspired this project in the first place. I wrote about the decision in Retiring Coding Fundamentals.

A portable pack of Cursor rules, skills, and scripts I built to keep my AI-assisted workflow grounded in fundamentals that actually matter - design before generation, small verified steps, deep modules, and lean context.

The idea came from a simple realization: good codebases matter more with AI, not less. Speed amplifies entropy, so the guardrails need to travel with you across every project.

What was inside

• global-fundamentals.mdc - a tiny always-on rule covering the core principles. Short enough to leave enabled everywhere.
• Rule templates - optional .mdc files for common project concerns, defaulting to alwaysApply: false so they only activate where they fit.
• Skills - an orchestrator skill for creating or refreshing the full fundamentals family, a "grill me" skill for design-concept discovery before plans or PRDs, and a "verified delegation" skill for multi-agent work checked by executed commands instead of agent self-reports.
• Install scripts - conservative PowerShell and Bash scripts for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
• Validation scripts - repo health checks for docs, rules, skills, and index entries.
• Docs - onboarding prompts, deduplication guidance, a self-assessment scorecard, and a workflow improvement loop.

Core principles

• Align on the design concept before generating large artifacts.
• Use ubiquitous language so humans, code, and agents share terms.
• Work in small verified steps - feedback rate is the speed limit.
• Prefer deep modules with simple interfaces.
• Design interfaces deliberately, then delegate implementation behind tests.
• Keep context lean so the agent spends attention on the work that matters.

Why I built it, and why I retired it

I kept copying the same rules and skills between projects and trimming duplicates after the fact. This repo became the canonical source - install the global rule everywhere, opt into templates per project, and use the skills when the conversation calls for it.

Then Matt Pocock's skills matured into a complete development lifecycle grounded in the same principles, refined by a feedback loop of millions of installs. Maintaining a parallel solo reimplementation stopped making sense, so I adopted his set and archived mine. The full story is in the retirement post.

Kudos to Matt Pocock's talk "Software Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever" which came at the perfect time and inspired me to finally get my AI house in order - twice.

License MIT.