Instructions and skills

Instructions tell the agent how you work: your conventions, the commands to run, what to avoid. You write them in plain AGENTS.md files, and Bica gives them to every session. Skills teach the agent a whole task, and it reads one only when the task comes up.

AGENTS.md files

Bica reads these files into every session, in this order:

1. ~/.bica/AGENTS.md, your own rules for every project.
2. The AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md in each folder from the top of the disk down to the session’s folder, so the closest one comes last.

• Directory~/.bica/

  • AGENTS.md your rules for every session
  • Directoryskills/ your skills for every project

    • …
• DirectoryRepos/

  • AGENTS.md read for every project under Repos/
  • Directorymy-app/

    • AGENTS.md this project’s rules
    • Directory.agents/skills/ this project’s skills

      • …

Edits reach sessions that are already running, from their next turn. A file you already wrote for Claude Code or another agent works as it is.

Skills

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that explains how to do one kind of task, in the Agent Skills format. The agent sees only each skill’s name and description, and reads the whole skill when a task matches, so having many skills costs little.

Bica looks for skills in the project’s .agents/skills, .claude/skills, and .bica/skills folders, then in the same folders in your home. When two skills share a name, the project’s wins. Skills written for Claude Code or Pi work as they are.

What Bica adds

Around your instructions, Bica tells the agent what it needs to work in Bica:

• What Bica is, and what this session is for.
• How to use each of its tools, such as keeping git read-only unless you ask.
• Its role, such as a night run’s rules for finishing alone.
• How to reply.

Replies are short on purpose, because you likely run several sessions and skim each one. The first sentence is the answer or the outcome, most replies are a few lines, and the last line says what to do next.

Sessions also start with the MEMORY.md file from their folder, if there is one. Assistant mode uses it to remember things across months.