Updating

How updates work

Updates happen in two places: the base installation in your home directory, and the commands in each project. You can update your projects with just the latest commands, or also refresh your standards from a profile.

Updating the base installation

When updating, you want to:

• Keep your ~/agent-os/profiles/ folder (this contains your standards)
• Replace the ~/agent-os/commands/ and ~/agent-os/scripts/ folders with the latest versions

If you’ve customized any commands or scripts, back those up separately and merge your changes after updating.

Option A: Manual update

Download the latest ZIP from github.com/buildermethods/agent-os, then manually replace the commands/ and scripts/ folders while keeping your profiles/ folder intact.

Option B: Command line

Back up your profiles folder:

cp -r ~/agent-os/profiles ~/agent-os-profiles-backup

Remove the old installation and clone the latest version:

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

Restore your profiles from the backup:

cp -r ~/agent-os-profiles-backup/* ~/agent-os/profiles/

Remove the backup folder:

rm -rf ~/agent-os-profiles-backup

Updating your projects

After updating the base installation, you can update your projects in two ways:

Commands only

Use this when you want the latest Agent OS commands but don’t want to change your project’s standards:

cd /path/to/your/project

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

This updates the slash commands in .claude/commands/agent-os/ without touching your standards, specs, or product docs.

Commands + standards

Use this when you’ve updated a profile’s standards or want to switch to a different profile:

cd /path/to/your/project

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

Without the --commands-only flag, the script will prompt you to confirm before overwriting your project’s standards with the ones from your profile. You can also specify a different profile:

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

Checking your version

Check the version in your base installation:

cat ~/agent-os/config.yml | grep version