# AI prompts

Curated, copyable prompts for handing Shelbi's docs to a coding agent — plus how to wire them into Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or your agent of choice.

Shelbi's docs are built to be read by agents as well as people. Every page is
available as clean markdown (append `.md` to any docs URL). The index lives at
[`/llms.txt`](/llms.txt), and the entire corpus is one file at
[`/llms-full.txt`](/llms-full.txt). This page collects prompts that put those
artifacts to work.

## The prompts

Copy one, fill in the bracketed placeholders, and paste it into your agent.
Each prompt points the agent at the docs so it works from the source of truth
rather than guessing.

> **Learn Shelbi from its docs** — Get your agent up to speed before you ask it anything else.

```text
Read the Shelbi documentation at https://shelbi.dev/llms-full.txt. Shelbi is an open-source, terminal-native agent orchestrator: a Kanban board that dispatches coding tasks to a pool of workspaces running coding agents, locally or over SSH. Once you have read it, give me a three-paragraph summary of how Shelbi works — workspaces, the orchestrator, workflows, and Zen Mode — then wait for my next question.
```

> **Set up my first Shelbi project** — Install Shelbi and configure this repository, with the docs as the source of truth.

```text
I want to set up Shelbi on this repository. Use the official docs: the index is at https://shelbi.dev/llms.txt, and any page is available as clean markdown by appending .md to its URL (for example https://shelbi.dev/docs/guides/getting-started/install.md). Read the Getting Started section, install Shelbi, run the detected preflight, and help me review its one-question setup card. Use the Customize path only if I want to change a detected value. Do not hand-write config that Shelbi can generate.
```

> **Design a custom workflow for my team** — Map your existing git branching model onto a Shelbi workflow.

```text
Read https://shelbi.dev/docs/guides/getting-started/workflows.md and the workflow guides linked from https://shelbi.dev/llms.txt. My team uses [describe your branching model — trunk-based, git-flow, feature-branch, or forking]. Design a Shelbi workflow that matches it: the statuses a task moves through, who owns each one, and the side-effects on each transition. Explain your choices, then produce the workflow YAML and the orchestrator instruction tweaks I need.
```

> **Enable Zen Mode safely** — Add the local checks Zen Mode needs, then turn it on.

```text
Read https://shelbi.dev/docs/guides/getting-started/enable-zen-mode.md and https://shelbi.dev/docs/concepts/zen-mode.md. Zen Mode lets the Shelbi orchestrator auto-promote backlog and auto-merge finished branches that clear a confidence bar. Look at this repository's test and lint setup, recommend the local checks I should wire in before trusting auto-merge, help me add them, then tell me exactly what to flip to enable Zen Mode.
```

> **Debug my Shelbi setup** — Hand your agent the docs and your config so it can diagnose the problem.

```text
Something in my Shelbi setup is not working: [describe what you see]. Read the relevant docs — start from the index at https://shelbi.dev/llms.txt and fetch the markdown for any page by appending .md to its URL. Then inspect the .shelbi/ config and project YAML in this repo, compare them against the docs, and tell me what is misconfigured and how to fix it.
```

## Using them with your agent

The prompts above work in any agent that can fetch a URL. These notes wire the
docs in a little more permanently for the two most common setups.

### Claude Code (CLAUDE.md)

Claude Code reads a `CLAUDE.md` file at the root of your project at the start of
every session. Add a pointer to Shelbi's docs so it always knows where to look:

```markdown
## Shelbi

This project is orchestrated with Shelbi. When you need to know how Shelbi
works, read https://shelbi.dev/llms.txt for the index, and append .md to any
docs URL for its clean markdown source
(e.g. https://shelbi.dev/docs/guides/getting-started/workflows.md).
```

With that in place you can paste any prompt above, or just ask Claude Code to
follow the pointer: "check the Shelbi docs, then help me add a review column."

### GitHub Copilot (#file)

Copilot Chat pulls a local file into context with `#file`. Save the full corpus
into your repo once:

```bash
curl -fsSL https://shelbi.dev/llms-full.txt -o docs/shelbi-llms-full.txt
```

Then reference it in Copilot Chat and add your question:

```text
#file:docs/shelbi-llms-full.txt

Using the Shelbi docs above, help me set up my first project.
```

Re-run the `curl` whenever you want to refresh the snapshot.

### Your agent of choice

Nothing here is Claude- or Copilot-specific. Point any agent at
[`/llms.txt`](/llms.txt) for the index or [`/llms-full.txt`](/llms-full.txt) for
the whole corpus, and remember that every docs page has a `.md` twin. The same
URL with `.md` appended returns clean markdown. Paste a prompt above and go.