How Devbook was made

Devbook is maintained by Nitin Raturi. It started on 22 October 2026 as a set of guides with a Starlight site. Since then it has become one bootstrap prompt that sets up a repository, plus a small catalog of vendor-maintained skills. Much of the work was done with AI coding assistants, directed by the maintainer, and the repository’s history records which commits they helped write.

Stages

22 October 2026: first version. The first commit added the guides, the templates and an Astro and Starlight site, built from a written build brief. The same day added CI with tests, accessibility and Lighthouse checks, the first decision records (ADRs) and hosting on Cloudflare Workers.

23 October 2026: simpler and unversioned. A versioned design with a release v1.0.0 was replaced within a day by a minimal set of instruction files that projects load through a git submodule. The copy method, the MIT-0 licence for templates and the mandatory core, testing, performance and API files followed.

24 to 25 October 2026: ready for public use. Instructions for databases, licensing, feature docs and REST APIs arrived, along with the start-here guides, the CC BY 4.0 licence for the text, and a rewrite of every instruction for how models follow rules. The public release was merged on 25 October.

2 November 2026: lighter and enforceable. A six-phase efficiency plan aimed to cut what every chat pays for:

• An evaluation harness that measures whether a Devbook version changes what an agent does.
• A rule-by-rule audit that cut about 410 rules to 250, each with a stable ID.
• Three loading tiers, so a chat starts with about 12 KB instead of every chosen file.
• Dated releases that projects pin, and a check that says when a newer one is out.
• An optional enforcement kit, for rules that tools enforce better than text.

3 November 2026: from author to curator. The rule files, stack notes, submodule and link scripts were replaced by one bootstrap prompt. It writes a 1 KB core block into AGENTS.md, installs at most three pinned skills from the vendors who maintain them (catalog), and adds hooks where the agent supports them. Two findings drove it: context files help only with facts agents can’t discover, and more than three skills give back most of their gain. The modelled evals were replaced by measured ones, run with and without Devbook. The plan has the reasoning and sources.

Every change, by date

The changelog lists every change, newest first, and the file on GitHub has the details and upgrade notes for each entry.

How AI was used

Claude and GitHub Copilot wrote much of the code and text under the maintainer’s direction. The maintainer chose what to build, answered the design questions, and decides what is merged and released. Of the first 147 commits, up to the one that added this page on 2 November 2026, 55 credit Claude Opus 5.5 as a co-author and 11 credit GitHub Copilot. The other commits don’t record whether an assistant helped.

Devbook holds its own text to these rules:

• Rules and catalog entries are based on primary sources, listed in catalog/sources.json.
• Facts are checked against those sources before they are published.
• AI suggestions are treated as drafts, not as sources.

If you find a line that is wrong or a claim that isn’t supported, please say so.