BotteryBarn

BotteryBarn is an engineering toolkit for designing reliable AI-powered workflows. It provides reusable prompt patterns, templates, and agent-driven solutions for real-world scenarios such as code generation, system design, debugging, and build system modernization — treating prompts as structured, composable artifacts in modern software development.

The agency model

BotteryBarn is organized around the agency model: agents are the primary primitive, and every other resource type — skills, tools, prompts, instructions — exists to be composed by an agent. See docs/AGENCY-MODEL.md for the rationale and decision tree.

Repository structure

BotteryBarn/
├── agents/         # Agent definitions (persona + methodology + output format)
│   └── _templates/ # Starter files to copy when adding a new agent
├── skills/         # Skill packages (multi-step procedures, Anthropic-style)
│   └── _templates/
├── tools/          # Tool catalog (MCP servers, CLIs, functions, APIs)
│   └── _templates/
├── prompts/        # Reusable, parameterized prompts
│   └── _templates/
├── instructions/   # Scoped behavioral rules (apply by file glob)
│   └── _templates/
├── docs/           # Documentation
└── scripts/        # PowerShell installer

Each top-level resource folder ships with its own README.md, a _templates/ directory, and at least one seed example. Full conventions and frontmatter schemas live in docs/STRUCTURE.md.

Quickstart

Install BotteryBarn into another repository on the same machine by symlinking the resource folders:

# Requires PowerShell 7+.
# On Windows: enable Developer Mode or run from an elevated shell.
cd <path-to-BotteryBarn>
./scripts/Install-BotteryBarn.ps1 -TargetPath <path-to-target-repo>

This creates directory symlinks at <target>/agents, <target>/skills, <target>/tools, <target>/prompts, and <target>/instructions pointing at this repo. Updates to BotteryBarn are then visible in every consuming repo without re-running the installer.

For full usage — options, troubleshooting, and ecosystem-specific overlays (.github/..., .claude/...) — see docs/USAGE.md.

Contributing

See docs/CONTRIBUTING.md for how to add a new agent, skill, tool, prompt, or instruction.