Canonical configs (skills, MCP, memory, etc.), fanned out to all your AI coding agents.

One Store at ~/.agents/ holds the single real copy of every config you share — skills, instructions, MCP servers, slash commands, subagents, hooks. agentstow sync fans it out to all ten agents you have installed: symlinks where the bytes can be identical, a rendered key-merge where they can't. There is no state file, and there never will be.

# the Store — one real copy of everything you share
~/.agents/
├── skills/          research/  tdd/  code-review/
├── commands/        ship.md  triage.md
├── subagents/       reviewer.md
├── AGENTS.md        your instructions, once
├── mcp.json         standard mcpServers shape
└── hooks/           SessionStart.toml  PreToolUse.toml

Fan-out

Edit one file. Every agent sees it.

$ ls -l ~/.claude/skills/
research    -> ../../.agents/skills/research
tdd         -> ../../.agents/skills/tdd
code-review -> ../../.agents/skills/code-review

$ ls -l ~/.codex/skills/
research    -> ../../.agents/skills/research
tdd         -> ../../.agents/skills/tdd
code-review -> ../../.agents/skills/code-review

Two mechanisms

Symlinked where it can be, rendered where it can't.

Skills, instructions, commands and subagents can be byte-identical everywhere, so they are one file seen from ten places — drift is impossible by construction. MCP servers and hooks live inside files the agent also owns, in formats no two agents share, so those are rendered and key-merged: your other keys are preserved, and only the entries named in the Store are rewritten.

# ~/.agents/mcp.json — you write this once
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "serena": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "serena-agent", "serena"]
    }
  }
}

# ~/.codex/config.toml — merged, not replaced
model = "gpt-5.3-codex"        # untouched

[mcp_servers.serena]
command = "uvx"
args = ["--from", "serena-agent", "serena"]

[projects."/Users/you/work"]   # untouched
trust_level = "trusted"

No state

The filesystem is the state.

Other tools in this space copy, render, and remember what they own in a record beside your configs. When that record disagrees with the disk, your hand-edits lose. agentstow keeps no record at all, because ownership is legible from the disk itself.

Link identity

A symlink that resolves into the Store is ours. It gets canonicalised, and pruned when it dangles.

Name identity

An MCP server, or a hook whose command appears in the Store, is ours. Every other name in the same file is Foreign and survives untouched.

Marker identity

A wholly generated file carries one comment line saying so. Marked is ours; unmarked was written by somebody else.

Restraint

Variants are a feature, not a conflict.

$ agentstow status
claude (.claude/skills)  12 linked
  variant           plannotator — left alone
  variant-identical old-notes — identical to the
                    Store, could be re-linked
  foreign           vendor-thing — not ours

mcp (mcp.json)
  managed           serena → claude
  foreign           xapi → claude — not in the
                    Store — left alone

2 items need attention — run `agentstow sync`.

Coverage

Ten agents, six families.

Safety

Safe to run before you trust it.

$ agentstow sync --dry-run
dry run — no changes will be made

claude (.claude/skills)
  missing   research
  missing   tdd
mcp (mcp.json)
  missing   serena → codex — not in this agent's config yet

3 changes would be made.

A second sync is a no-op

Run it twice and the second run reports Everything is up to date with the files byte-identical.

Every write is atomic

A private temp file, fsync, then an atomic rename — resolved through a symlinked destination, so dotfiles wiring survives.

Secrets stay out of the Store and out of your terminal

${env:VAR} is resolved at sync and redacted from every line of output, so the Store stays committable.

It reports to CI

status --json and mcp list --json, with exit code 2 reserved for “there is something to do”.

Install

macOS and Linux.

# prebuilt binary — no toolchain, no postinstall script
npm install -g agentstow

# or from source, needs Rust 1.97+
cargo install agentstow

# then, on a machine you have already been using
agentstow init

init creates the Store and then tells you what of your existing config it could take over — per family, with the command that would do it.

Limits

What it does not do.