Developer Builds Repo-Specific AI Coding Rules After Generic Guides Failed Teams

A developer tasked with introducing AI-assisted development on a project found that no shared rules or agent guidelines existed, so they built a custom set tailored to that specific codebase's structure and conventions. The rules worked well enough that other teams requested copies, but the files referenced folder names and patterns unique to the original repo, making them unsuitable for direct reuse elsewhere. Attempts to share them as a reference fell flat because teams lacked the time or context to adapt them independently. The developer identified this as a generation problem rather than a documentation one, recognizing that useful rules must be rendered for a specific stack, not written generically. This led to the creation of FARE and BARE — frontend and backend AI starter recipes published as an npm CLI tool — designed to generate repo-specific rules compatible with multiple AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot.