ALIGNS.md records the goals and trade-offs you want your agent to use. The align skill helps you agree on those criteria and revisit them as the work changes.
Keep personal criteria in ALIGNS.md and the reusable alignment method in the skill. Connect the agreement through your primary agent instruction file, such as AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md. Use Git history when available. Updating the skill never rewrites your agreement.
Use specialist skills within those criteria. Their default style does not become your personal preference; choices already settled in ALIGNS.md do not need another question. See recommended companion skills for development, design, review and writing.
The criteria you agree on carry over to the next task. Your agent uses the preferences it already knows, so you spend less time explaining how you want things done or making each choice yourself.
When a result misses what you had in mind, revise the criteria together and use them in the next task.
Self-alignment means clarifying your preferences and decision criteria with your agent, then checking its work against them.
Return to alignment when an important decision misses your intent, repeated corrections reveal a missing criterion, or you are unsure what to do next. You can also review selected PR feedback and accessible project conversations to find recurring criteria, called taste invariants, with their scope and exceptions. Choose recent or full history after seeing the estimated time. Before a long autonomous run, rehearse a few hypothetical choices. Clear errors get fixed directly; settled questions stay settled.
Brief requests work too. The agent checks existing context, then asks only about gaps that would materially change the result. You can agree on when it should ask and when it should proceed. Only confirmed lasting preferences go into ALIGNS.md.
Paste this request into your agent:
Set up the maintained align skill from https://github.com/hmmhmmhm/aligns.md using its current installation guide. Check my existing setup, use the supported route for my primary CLI, connect ALIGNS.md to this project, and configure supported method updates. Preserve existing instructions and my confirmed criteria; ask only about unresolved choices.
Or install it directly:
npx skills add hmmhmmhm/aligns.md --skill alignThen ask: Let's do a self-alignment check for this project. No command or exact phrase is required.
Installation, updates and the eight starting points
Prepare reviewed decisions from code reviews and agent conversations as training data for your coding agent. Your team handles training and evaluation.
MLOps and team adoption brief · Manual submission guide
Use this badge in your README if your project uses ALIGNS.md. Ask the agent to add it or choose option 7 when offered. The agent offers this option only when the badge is missing. You can also copy the Markdown below.
[](https://github.com/hmmhmmhm/aligns.md)MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 hmmhmmhm.