Hacker News Reader

Comment by optikalfire | Hacker News Reader

Is this substantially different than https://github.com/intellectronica/ruler? Or how would you differentiate?

Looks very similar. That's good - diversity and more options are good.

But ... as the author and maintainer of Ruler I can tell you that I don't use it and I don't recommend using it (or this new tool).

In almost all cases it isn't necessary anymore - most agents support AGENTS.md (or at least a hack like `@AGENTS.md` in CLAUDE.md), and Agent Skills are the best way to customise agents and are available everywhere now.

There are some corner cases where using a tool like Ruler may still make sense, but if in doubt, you probably don't need it.

Yes, just softlink (or @-mention). I'm more concerned about incompatible file formats (eg. with skills).

Yup with simple AGENTS file and skills, tools like ruler/lnai might be an overkill. However I still think that they are needed for MCPs/Permissions/sub-dir rules/different skills formats.

I would really like all AI agents coding tools to have the same config formats, but I feel like we are not there yet :/

Yes, for MCP servers there's still no good standard. Ruler helps with that. I happen to not use MCPs much, but for a setup that is MCP-heavy that can help.

At a glance there are a few differences: - LNAI additionally supports permissions - The way rules for sub-directories are defined is different. Ruler defines rules for sub-directories in the sub-directories themselves under ‘.ruler/‘. LNAI defines rules for sub-directories by using front matter ‘paths’ property and storing all rules under ‘.ai/rules’ - ruler supports more tools (I will continue maintaining and improving lnai to also support more tools / configs) - lnai supports per tool overrides in ‘.ai/.{codex/claude/etc.}’ for more granular control while keeping a single source of truth - ruler is a more mature package

Reply on news.ycombinator.com