Manifest and Drift

This page explains how OAT remembers what it manages and how it distinguishes clean sync state from drift, missing files, or unmanaged strays.

Quick Look

• What it does: describes the manifest contract behind provider sync and the drift/adoption model built on top of it.
• When to use it: when oat status shows drift or strays and you need to understand why OAT thinks a file is managed, missing, or adoptable.
• Primary commands: oat status, oat init, oat sync

Manifest locations

• Project: .oat/sync/manifest.json
• User: ~/.oat/sync/manifest.json

Manifest purpose

Tracks managed mappings so the CLI can:

• detect drift safely
• avoid deleting unmanaged provider content
• execute scoped removals only for managed entries

Install-triggered auto-sync narrows that removal scope further: after oat tools install <pack>, the follow-up sync only plans removals for canonical entries from the installed pack. This protects unrelated provider views if the current worktree has stale manifest entries for other packs whose canonical assets are missing locally.

Autonomous worktree bootstrap also treats sync output as setup state. oat-worktree-bootstrap-auto checks inherited cleanliness before the all-scope sync run, then commits dirty sync-managed output as chore: run sync when needed. The commit is scoped to existing or tracked sync paths (.oat/sync/manifest.json, .claude, .cursor, .codex) and reports the result as sync_commit: pass | fail | skip in its structured status.

For transformed mappings such as project-scoped rules, the manifest stores hashes for the rendered provider output that was actually written, not the canonical source markdown. This keeps drift detection aligned with the on-disk managed file.

Drift states

• in_sync
• drifted
• missing
• stray

drifted reasons currently include:

• modified
• broken
• replaced

Rendered rule files participate in the same drift states as other managed copies. If a provider rule file is edited directly, drift is computed against the expected rendered output for that provider.

Stray adoption

oat init and oat status can offer adoption of unmanaged provider entries into canonical .agents.

Provider files ignored by Git are treated as intentionally local runtime files and are not reported as strays. This includes files covered by tracked .gitignore, repo-local .git/info/exclude, or other standard Git exclude mechanisms.

Provider files listed in sync config knownStrays are also omitted from stray summaries and adoption prompts. Known strays can be configured at project scope in .oat/sync/config.json or user scope in ~/.oat/sync/config.json; entries use exact provider-path matching, so .cursor/skills/cloud-environment-setup does not suppress .cursor/skills/cloud-environment-setup-extra.

Cursor skill migration

Cursor reads canonical project and user skills directly from .agents/skills and ~/.agents/skills. OAT therefore treats .cursor/skills as a Cursor-only extension and adoption surface rather than generated output.

Interactive oat init and oat status ask about every unresolved Cursor-local skill separately:

• Adopt: move the skill to the matching canonical .agents/skills directory without creating a Cursor skill view or manifest row. If identical canonical content already exists, OAT removes the redundant Cursor-local copy.
• Keep Cursor-only: leave the skill in place and immediately add its exact normalized path to the applicable project or user sync config.
• Abort: keep the current and remaining skills unresolved. Choices already completed in the same run remain saved.

Keep Cursor-only is unavailable when a canonical skill has the same name. Rename one skill before retrying; Cursor does not document a safe precedence rule for duplicates discovered from both roots. Non-interactive and JSON modes report pending migration actions without choosing or mutating a disposition.

Retiring legacy Cursor skill views

When upgrading from generated Cursor skill views, sync classifies each obsolete manifest-owned path before acting:

• Verified clean symlinks and managed copies are removed with their manifest entries.
• Missing paths lose only their stale manifest entries.
• Modified, replaced, broken, unreadable, or otherwise unverified paths are preserved while OAT detaches their obsolete manifest ownership.
• Unmanaged Cursor-only content is never removed.

Use oat sync --scope <project|user|all> --dry-run to distinguish planned removal from preserve-and-detach operations before running a mutating sync.

For rules, adoption maps provider-native files back into .agents/rules/*.md:

• Claude: .claude/rules/*.md
• Cursor: .cursor/rules/*.mdc
• Copilot: .github/instructions/*.instructions.md

After adoption, oat sync regenerates the managed provider copies from the canonical rule file.

Generated provider roles

Some Codex roles are generated-derived - produced by the Codex sync extension rather than mapped 1:1 from a canonical .agents/agents/*.md file. Materialized dispatch roles are the current example: a matrix target or oat providers codex materialize command supplies a canonical agent, model, and reasoning effort, and OAT writes a role such as oat-phase-implementer-gpt-5-6-terra-xhigh.

oat status and oat init treat any role listed in the Codex extension plan's managedRoles set as managed, so generated variants are not reported as stray and are not offered for adoption — even though they have no canonical .agents source. A genuinely orphaned Codex role (no canonical source and not in managedRoles) is still flagged.

Reference artifacts

• .oat/projects/<scope>/<project>/spec.md (FR2, FR3, FR6)
• .oat/projects/<scope>/<project>/design.md
• packages/cli/src/manifest/**
• packages/cli/src/drift/**