neva-boost

Composes the Neva framework's agent guidelines into your project.

Neva's packages ship their own guidance inside their wheels. This tool finds it, keeps only what applies to the versions you actually installed, and writes it where your coding agent will read it. The point is that nobody hand-maintains a pile of skills describing a framework that keeps moving: the guidance ships with the code it describes, and you regenerate.

Install

uv add --dev neva-boost
uv run neva-boost install

That writes one Claude Code skill per topic under .claude/skills/. For an agent-agnostic project, or as a fallback alongside the skills:

uv run neva-boost install --target agents            # a marked region in AGENTS.md
uv run neva-boost install --target all               # every target
uv run neva-boost install --target agents --target claude   # or name them

Re-run it after upgrading a Neva package. --dry-run reports what would change without touching anything.

How it composes

A contributing package declares a manifest through the neva.boost entry-point group:

[project.entry-points."neva.boost"]
neva = "neva.guidelines:MANIFEST"          # the core
neva-fastapi = "neva.fastapi.guidelines:MANIFEST"

The manifest is read structurally -- a name string and a fragments directory. Nothing here is imported by the packages that contribute, so the framework-agnostic core does not depend on its own tooling.

The entry-point name is the package's label, and it is what gets rendered: skills are named <label>-<id>, so neva-events and neva-fastapi-routing. It is deliberately separate from the distribution name, which is only what you would uv add -- the core is neva to people and python-neva on PyPI, where the short name was already taken. Choosing it in your own pyproject.toml is the point; it must be a kebab-case slug, because it becomes part of a directory name.

Each fragment is a Markdown file with frontmatter:

---
id: database-transactions
title: Database and transactions
requires: python-neva>=4.1
triggers: [database query, opening a transaction, DB.begin, savepoint, rollback]
priority: 40
verified_by: [tests/database/test_transaction.py]
---

A transaction-first wrapper over SQLAlchemy async. Never build an engine...

requires is checked against the installed version, so a project on an older release is given the guidance for the release it has rather than guidance for one it does not. triggers becomes the skill description an agent routes on -- that is what makes one skill per topic cheaper than one document per framework. priority orders the output. Nothing reserves a range -- the core's own fragments sit at 10 to 60, so a plugin that wants to be read after them picks something above that.

An id has to be unique among the fragments that apply, not among the files on disk. A package can therefore ship one file per release line for the same topic and let requires choose between them:

fragments/transactions-legacy.md   requires: python-neva>=3.0,<4.0
fragments/transactions.md          requires: python-neva>=4.0

Exactly one applies, so exactly one is rendered. Two fragments that share an id and both apply is a real conflict, and it is reported.

Keeping the guidance honest

verified_by names the tests that prove a fragment's claims. check holds them to it, and belongs in the contributing package's CI:

uv run neva-boost check neva/guidelines/fragments

It fails on malformed frontmatter, an empty verified_by, any cited test path that no longer resolves, and two files sharing an id with the same requires. It deliberately allows the release-line variants above -- a conflict between two overlapping-but-different specifiers surfaces at install time, in the environment where they actually collide. A behaviour change that lands without touching the fragment that describes it will usually take a cited test with it -- which is the point. Documentation that cannot go stale silently is worth more than documentation that is merely correct today.

Run it with no arguments to check what is installed instead; only fragments living inside --root have their verified_by paths resolved, since a fragment from a wheel names tests that wheel does not ship.

Inspecting

uv run neva-boost list

Prints every applicable fragment with its package, priority and topic, then anything skipped and why -- requires 'python-neva>=4.2', but python-neva 4.1.0 is installed is a normal answer, not a failure.

What it writes

--target claude owns .claude/skills/<label>-<id>/SKILL.md. Files it generates carry a marker comment, and only files carrying it are ever deleted -- a skill you wrote by hand is left alone even if it sits where ours would.

When a fragment goes away, the generated SKILL.md is deleted and its directory follows only if that was the last thing in it. Anything you added alongside it is yours, and a directory that keeps something of yours keeps it.

--target agents owns the region between <!-- BEGIN neva-boost --> and <!-- END neva-boost --> in AGENTS.md, and preserves everything outside it. If only one of the two markers survives an edit or a merge, it refuses rather than guess.

Develop

uv sync --all-extras
poe lint && poe fmt && poe tc && poe test

Commits follow Conventional Commits with gitmoji via cz commit; releases are cut with cz bump.