Copying the last repo's agent setup into a new one worked at first. It also copied product-specific assumptions. Once I had several active projects, there was no longer a single canonical repo I could copy from. Every improvement now had several places it could drift.
I was doing that across Codenames AI, a portfolio site, and a resume generator. Shared workflows for planning, editorial work, dependency upgrades, review, and repo bootstrap had accumulated around them. Some still lived inside product repos simply because that was where they had evolved.
I wanted the next repo to start with the methodology already available, without cloning the implementation details of the last product.
My first instinct was to solve that with an MCP-shaped architecture. Extract the shared behavior into a separate repository. Expose it through a remote tool boundary. Every repo could call the same capability when it needed merge-safe planning rules or editorial workflow guidance.
That felt rigorous. One service. One contract. One place to version policy.
