Disciplines

Disciplines are always-on behavioral rules that shape how any agent (main or sub) operates. They are not loaded on demand for a specific workflow — they are ambient, active in every session and in every subagent that carries them.

Tagline: Governance defines what is correct. Discipline defines what is habitual.

What disciplines encode

Disciplines encode cross-cutting habits — behaviors the agent should follow everywhere, not just in one workflow:

• When to act — commit after each unit of work, not at the end of a session
• How to behave — always brief subagents with full context before delegating
• What to avoid — never batch unrelated changes into one commit

They are not standards for a specific domain. A discipline does not say “here is what a valid skill looks like” — that is governance. A discipline says “here is how you work, always.”

How disciplines reach the agent

Disciplines are ambient — they reach the agent through any always-on channel:

Channel	How it works
AGENTS.md section	Written into the repo’s AGENTS.md; loaded by the harness at session start
SessionStart hook	Shell command registered to fire at session start; injects rules from AGENTS.md or a pinned CLI
Agent definition	Written into a subagent’s instruction block; active whenever that subagent is spawned

A single discipline rule can be delivered through more than one channel — for example, commit discipline is both written in AGENTS.md and reinforced by a SessionStart hook that re-injects it even if AGENTS.md is absent.

Disciplines vs Governances

Both are verified the same way: give the agent a scenario, observe what it does, check the outcome. The distinction is not how you test them.

	Discipline	Governance
When active	Always-on, any agent or sub	On demand, per workflow
Content shape	Cross-cutting behavioral habits	Normative rules for a specific domain
Delivery channel	Hooks, AGENTS.md, agent definitions	governance show via CLI
Static analysis	Not applicable — habits require behavioral observation	Yes — tools like audit-skill check artifacts against governance rules

Verifying discipline compliance

Discipline compliance is verified by behavioral testing: give the agent a scenario with the discipline active, observe what the agent does, and check the outcome. There is no document to diff — only behavior to observe.

This is the same mechanism used to verify governance compliance. The difference is content, not test method.

ACED provides the evaluation framework for both.

Example: Commit Discipline

Commit Discipline is the canonical example. It encodes:

• Commit after each unit of work — do not batch
• One concern per commit, never two unrelated changes
• Stage explicitly by file, verify with git diff --cached
• Use Conventional Commits

It is registered as a SessionStart hook and written into AGENTS.md. Neither requires the agent to load anything — the rules are always present.

Creating a discipline

A discipline is a section in AGENTS.md (or a subagent definition), optionally reinforced by a SessionStart hook. There is no special file format — the rule text itself is the discipline.

To register a SessionStart hook that injects a section:

node packages/cyberplace/bin/cyberplace.mjs hook register \
  --name my-discipline --event SessionStart \
  --extract AGENTS.md --heading "My Discipline"

The hook re-injects the named section from AGENTS.md at the start of every session, so the rules stay active even when AGENTS.md is not otherwise loaded.

Related

• Commit Discipline — the canonical example
• Commit Discipline — how the commit-discipline plugin sets this up in a repo
• Governances — on-demand domain standards; the complementary concept
• Agent Configuration — full picture of what shapes agent behavior
• ADR-0001 — the decision that split governance and discipline into separate terms