.clinerules

.clinerules is the project-level instruction file for Cline, the open-source AI coding assistant, letting a team give the agent persistent, repository-specific guidance — coding conventions, architectural constraints, and behavioral rules — that apply on every task. It can be a single .clinerules file or a .clinerules/ folder of focused rule documents, committed alongside the code so the whole team shares the same guardrails.

• Project-scoped rules - Coding standards, patterns to follow, and things to avoid, expressed in plain Markdown.
• File or folder form - A single .clinerules file, or a .clinerules/ directory that splits rules into modular, toggleable documents.
• Version-controlled - Lives in the repo so guidance travels with the codebase and evolves through normal review.
• Agent guardrails - Encodes “always do this / never do that” instructions that steer the agent’s edits and commands.

Like CLAUDE.md, .clinerules is part of the emerging pattern of per-agent instruction files that turn tacit team knowledge into machine-consumable configuration. For API teams it is a place to pin governance expectations — naming conventions, security rules, required tests — so that an agent working in the codebase respects them by default. As coding agents take on more day-to-day work, these rule files become a practical control point for keeping AI-driven changes consistent with an organization’s standards.