missing-ai-context-file
Projects edited by AI assistants should ship a context file (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursorrules, or equivalent)
Applies to: Project-level
Why this matters
Modern codebases are increasingly written and modified by AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Aider, and others). Without a context file at the repo root the assistant starts every session blind: it doesn't know the architecture, the conventions, the commands to run tests, which libraries you've already chosen, or what's load-bearing and must not change. Every session re-discovers this from scratch, and every re-discovery is a fresh chance to pick the wrong pattern, invent a helper that already exists, break a convention, or delete something important. A single CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md file turns that blindness into onboarding: the assistant (and any new human) reads the file once and starts making informed decisions. The cost of writing the file is an hour; the cost of not having it compounds across every AI-assisted change the team ships.
Catch it before it ships
pip install stablestack # or: npx stablestackstablestack # scans your project, PROJ001 includedstablestack explain PROJ001False positive in your codebase? Suppress a single line with # noqa: PROJ001
More Project Setup checks
missing-git
Projects should use git for version control
PROJ003pyright-config
Project should have a pyright configuration with sensible defaults.
PROJ004beta-dependencies
Pre-release dependency may have stability issues
PROJ005gitignored-claude-md
CLAUDE.md should not be gitignored — it belongs in version control.
PROJ006firm-alias-commit-author
Commits are authored under a firm or team alias instead of a specific person
PROJ007low-test-coverage-ratio
Codebase has a large amount of hand-written source code but very few automated tests
PROJ008macos-fork-safety-missing
Shell script starts gunicorn/uvicorn/flask with reload but doesn't export OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY — macOS devs will see 'Python quit unexpectedly' popups on every worker reload.