Installation

Two-part installation

Agent OS has two parts:

1. Base installation — Lives in your home directory (~/agent-os/). Holds your profiles, scripts, and slash commands.
2. Project installation — Lives in your project (your-project/agent-os/). Holds standards, specs, and product docs specific to that project.

This separation lets you maintain standards across multiple projects while keeping each project self-contained.

Step 1: Base installation

Get Agent OS into your home directory using one of two methods:

Option A: Git clone

Clone the repository to your home directory:

cd ~

git clone https://github.com/buildermethods/agent-os.git && rm -rf ~/agent-os/.git

Option B: Download ZIP

If you prefer not to use git, download the ZIP file directly:

1. Download the ZIP from github.com/buildermethods/agent-os (Code → Download ZIP)
2. Extract the contents
3. Move the extracted folder to your home directory and rename it to agent-os

Either method creates ~/agent-os/ with:

• profiles/ — Your reusable standards sets
• scripts/ — Installation and sync scripts
• commands/ — Slash commands that get copied to projects
• config.yml — Configuration including default profile

Step 2: Install into your project

Navigate to your project directory and run the installation script:

cd /path/to/your/project

~/agent-os/scripts/project-install.sh

Windows Users: The installation command requires a bash shell. We recommend using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which provides a full Linux environment on Windows. Alternatively, you can use Git Bash (included with Git for Windows) to run the installation command. Once installed, open your bash terminal and run the command above.

This creates:

• agent-os/standards/ — Your project's coding standards
• agent-os/standards/index.yml — Index for standard matching
• .claude/commands/agent-os/ — Slash commands for Claude Code

Using a specific profile

To install with a specific profile:

~/agent-os/scripts/project-install.sh --profile rails

Commands only

To update only the commands (preserving existing standards):

~/agent-os/scripts/project-install.sh --commands-only

Next steps

• Learn about profiles
• Discover standards from your codebase