Context

Context assets provide persistent instructions or project conventions to coding agents, deployed to fixed paths derived from the context filename rather than into a type subdirectory.

Directory layout

Each context asset is a directory containing a context file and an optional _meta.yaml sidecar.

context/
├── go-project-rules/
│   ├── CLAUDE.md
│   └── _meta.yaml
└── coding-standards/
    └── CLAUDE.md

File format

The context file (e.g., CLAUDE.md) contains the instructions or conventions in plain Markdown. The optional _meta.yaml sidecar carries metadata used by nd for listing and filtering.

# _meta.yaml
description: "Project coding standards and conventions"
tags: ["standards", "conventions"]
target_language: "go"
target_project: "my-project"
target_agent: "claude-code"

Deploy behavior

Context assets deploy to fixed paths determined by the context filename, not into a context/ subdirectory. This differs from all other asset types.

For a context asset whose context file is CLAUDE.md:

• At global scope, nd symlinks to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
• At project scope, nd symlinks to ./CLAUDE.md at the project root — not inside .claude/

Files named *.local.md are treated as local-only and deploy at project scope regardless of the --scope flag.

Scope rules

Related

• Asset type comparison for a side-by-side overview of all types

Create a context asset

mkdir -p ~/my-assets/context/go-standards

cat > ~/my-assets/context/go-standards/CLAUDE.md << 'EOF'
Always use table-driven tests. Prefer stdlib over third-party libraries.
Return errors explicitly; do not panic in library code.
EOF

cat > ~/my-assets/context/go-standards/_meta.yaml << 'EOF'
description: "Go project conventions"
tags: ["go", "standards"]
EOF

nd deploy context/go-standards --scope project