Rules

A rule is a sentence you want the agent to obey. bee stores it, and the hooks deliver it — at session start, on every prompt, or on the file it is about.

bee hook rule add "never call GetCollection directly — use a DataSource"
bee hook rule list
bee hook rule rm <id>

Scope — when the rule is delivered

bee hook rule add "<text>" --scope always|session|prompt|file

scope	delivered
always (default)	at session start and on every prompt
session	once, at session start
prompt	on every prompt
file	only when a matching file is written — see below

Path rules — the ones that save tokens

A rule can name the files it is about:

bee hook rule add "a DataSource never calls GetCollection" --path '*DataSource.cs'
bee hook rule add "every component has a Vitest spec" --path 'src/**/*.vue'

--path implies file delivery. And this is the point: a rule that names files is excluded from the per-turn block entirely. The fifty turns that touch nothing relevant stop paying for it, and the one that does gets it unburied among rules that do not apply.

Glob syntax

Deliberately gitignore-shaped, because that is the notation people already know:

pattern	matches
*DataSource.cs	that file name anywhere in the tree
src/**/*.vue	any .vue under src/, at any depth
deploy/**	everything under a directory
src/*.cs	only directly inside src/ — * stops at a /

Matching is case-insensitive: a rule author is describing a convention, not addressing an inode.

Project scope

By default a rule steers this project only — resolved from the git remote, so the same checkout on another machine is the same project. To steer everything:

bee hook rule add "commit messages are English" --global

Attribution

Every rule records who wrote it, read from git’s own config (repository-local identity wins over global). On a team store, bee hook rule list tells you whose convention you are following.

Seeing what it costs

bee budget

Breaks the injected context down by component, for session start and for a sample prompt. If a rule set has grown expensive, this is where it shows.