I built a package manager for AI agent best practices — because knowing them and applying them are completely different problems

A few years ago I started doing something embarrassing: making a list of software engineering best practices I actually knew well enough to apply.

SOLID principles. Conventional commits. Blameless retrospectives. The Google SRE handbook. A handful of others.

The list was shorter than I expected.

Not because I was lazy. I'd read plenty. But reading about a practice and having it available when you need it — at 11pm debugging a production incident, or mid-PR-review when you're already context-switched — are completely different things. The gap between knowing a practice exists and applying it consistently in daily work is enormous, and most of us just quietly accept it.

Then I started wondering how many practices I'd never even heard of. Architectural decision records. Pre-mortems. The Five Whys. The ABA Model Rules for legal review. Different domains — engineering, finance, law, medicine, leadership — each have decades of accumulated wisdom. Most of it is documented, cited, and public. None of it is particularly accessible.