[FEATURE] Use both global and local instructions

[luketych]

What

• For my current flow it would be extra nice to be able to have some global instructions in the ls ~/.config/ruler folder, and also have instructions specific to different projects I am working on inside of .ruler, and be able to run ruler apply, and have both applied to my AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and other files.

Why?

• I can have custom instructions that I want all of my python / node.js / etc project to follow. Style guides, error handling strategies, etc.
• For specific projects I can then add to those rules.

How?

• To start with, just adding the 2 files together would be enough.
• Future Enhancements: The ability to override some global instructions with local ones.

[abhishekbhakat]

Shouldn't change the default behaviour.
So, like a new option? say ruler apply --merge-global, something like that?

Override global with local is an anti pattern IMO.

[intellectronica]

I can see how it might be useful, if and only if you know what you're doing. But in practice it's going to be so confusing and too easy to shoot oneself in the foot.

I would prefer to not implement this, at least not until someone comes with a very elegant and easy to understand design (I can't).

[luketych]

Ok let me give it some thought.

My idea was that often we have some markdown files we want our agent to follow on every project. And then we have guidelines and rules we only want the agent to use for specific projects. But how can we accomplish both?

I understand that if not done with care it would be an anti-pattern. However, if implemented in a certain way I can see the value and think it could possible be done it an intuitive way that would avoid falling into anti-pattern pitfalls.

[homostellaris]

This cascading behaviour is common and how Claude consumes CLAUDE.md files, I don't think users would find it confusing personally.

[rayshan]

+1, I thought the default behavior is ruler merging global and local instructions. I was surprised my global instructions weren't merged at all. A lot of agent instructions are universal, e.g. plan before you write code.

[luketych]

@intellectronica interesting to take a look at poml-extended. It will be released soon, and allows you to compile xml-like tags into markdown files for ingestion into LLMs. One of its use cases is to take multiple files and consolidate them into a single file, or to on-the-fly use a placeholder that gets replaced by dynamic text, which could be different for different LLMs, different projects, use cases, etc.

Interesting..