title	AI-Forward Starter Kit
description	A drop-in starter kit for adopting the AI-Forward Coding Principles and the AIo documentation specification in an existing project.
type	explanation
status	draft
audience	both
tags	ai-forward aio starter-kit landing
related	ADOPT.md GREENFIELD.md .ai-forward/README.md .ai-forward/PRINCIPLES.md
ai_context	Public landing for the AI-Forward starter kit. Explains what the kit is, who it is for, what it costs to adopt, and points at ADOPT.md for the brownfield walkthrough or GREENFIELD.md for new projects.
retrieval_hooks	What is the AI-Forward starter kit? Who is the AI-Forward kit for? What does adopting AI-Forward cost?
not_for	The brownfield adoption walkthrough — see ADOPT.md. The greenfield variant — see GREENFIELD.md. The post-adoption guide (read after copying .ai-forward/) — see .ai-forward/README.md.
provenance	editorial_responsibility responsible_party contact jurisdiction wandering-monster info@wanderingmonster.dev EU
aio_version	0.2.0

AI-Forward Starter Kit

This repository is a drop-in starter kit for adopting the AI-Forward Coding Principles and the AIo documentation specification in an existing project. The kit is files an adopter copies — a .ai-forward/ directory with a constitution template, an AGENTS.md, AIo-conformant document templates, and a vendored reference linter. It is not a CLI, a generator, or a framework.

The kit is aimed at brownfield projects first: repositories with existing documentation, tooling, and opinions that need a context-economical harness without a rewrite. Greenfield adopters use the same kit, minus the files they do not need (see GREENFIELD.md). The runtime cost is a .ai-forward/ directory at your repo root, Python 3 with pyyaml and jsonschema to run the linter, and CC BY-SA 4.0 attribution. There are no other dependencies.

Start with ADOPT.md — a five-step walkthrough that takes a project from zero to a lint-clean converted document in about fifteen minutes.

Vendoring protocol

The kit ships a vendored copy of the AIo reference linter and the schema it validates against, so adopters get a working gate with no shared dependency on the AIo repo:

• .ai-forward/tools/aio-lint.py — a verbatim copy of tools/aio-lint.py from AIo HEAD, under a provenance header pinning the SHA-256 of its body and of the schema. Marked do not edit.
• .ai-forward/schemas/aio-0.2.0.json — the normative schema, copied verbatim; the linter resolves it via parent.parent/schemas/.

Refresh by re-running the vendoring procedure against a chosen AIo commit: regenerate the provenance header with fresh body and schema hashes, and re-copy both files. Do not hand-edit either vendored file or bump the header by hand.

Drift guard. Per-push CI (.forgejo/workflows/ci.yml) recomputes both hashes and the linter's SPEC_VERSION and compares them to the pinned values; any mismatch fails the build. This is what keeps the vendored copy honest — the kit linter cannot silently diverge from the AIo source it claims to mirror.

The linter requires pyyaml and jsonschema (it validates frontmatter against the JSON Schema); adopters install both.

See also

• ADOPT.md — the brownfield adoption walkthrough.
• GREENFIELD.md — the variant for new projects.
• .ai-forward/README.md — the guide adopters read after copying the kit into their repo.
• .ai-forward/PRINCIPLES.md — the AI-Forward five-pillar manifesto (reference).

Not this document

• The brownfield walkthrough — see ADOPT.md.
• The greenfield variant — see GREENFIELD.md.
• Post-adoption guidance — see .ai-forward/README.md, read after copying.