CONVENTIONS.md is the roster index: every agent's name, what it is for, its
division, and the path to its full instructions.
Aider keeps a conventions file in context for the whole session — that is the point of the file. The 279 agent bodies together are about 3.8 million characters, roughly a million tokens, so a conventions file holding all of them does not fit in any model and costs a fortune in the attempt.
The index is about 97,000 characters (~24k tokens). Load it read-only so aider marks it cacheable, and pull in a single agent's full instructions when you actually need them.
# Run from your project root
cd /your/project
/path/to/agency-agents/scripts/install.sh --tool aiderNaming the agent is usually enough — its description is already in context:
Use the Frontend Developer agent to refactor this component.
When you want the agent's full instructions, read its file into the session. The index gives you the path:
/read-only /path/to/agency-agents/engineering/engineering-frontend-developer.md
aider --read CONVENTIONS.md--read marks the file read-only and lets aider cache it when prompt caching
is enabled, so the index is not re-sent on every turn.
./scripts/convert.sh --tool aider