How to give Claude Code, Cursor and Codex your team's coding standards

Coding agents are only as good as the context they get. Without it, they write code that compiles but does not look like your codebase: different naming, a different error handling style, tests in the wrong place. So teams start feeding them context. And that is where the trouble begins.

The copy problem

The usual first step is a rules file in each repository. It works for one project. With five repositories, you have five copies that drift apart. Someone updates the error handling rule in one of them, the others keep the old version, and the agent in the next repository happily follows the outdated one.

The same happens across tools. One developer uses Claude Code, another Cursor, a third Codex. Each tool has its own place for instructions, and each copy needs to be kept in sync by hand.

One source, loaded on demand

The alternative is to keep your standards in one place and let the agents fetch them when a task needs them. That is what MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is for: an open standard that lets AI tools use outside tools and data.

With sqemes connected over MCP, an agent gets tools to search your library and load a skill. When a task touches your API, it can find the skill with your API conventions and load it. When a pull request is ready, it can load the review checklist. Nobody has to paste anything.

Skills load step by step. The agent sees the outline of a skill first and reads a reference file only when the task needs it, so a large style guide does not fill the context window for a one-line fix.

What to put into an engineering skill

Start with what reviewers comment on most often:

• Coding conventions: naming, structure, error handling, logging.
• The review checklist: what a pull request must have before it can be merged.
• Architecture context: how the system fits together, as a reference file the agent reads when it needs it.
• Docs style: one guide for every README and doc page.

A skill can also carry script files. They travel with the skill, and the tool that loads them runs them on its side. sqemes itself never runs code from a skill.

Personas for roles

Once you have a few skills, a persona ties them together. A Tech Lead persona can say: load the coding conventions while code is written, load the review checklist when a pull request is reviewed, use the release notes prompt when a version ships. Over MCP, Claude Code, Cursor and Codex can load that persona and work in the role.

Setting it up

In sqemes, Settings, API and MCP walks you through each client in three steps. Every developer connects with their own account and sees the playbooks they have access to. The rights are the same as in the app: if a skill is restricted to the platform team, it stays restricted in every agent.

Change a convention once, and every agent loads the new version from then on. With review switched on, a change to a shared skill waits for release before the rest of the team works with it.

See how the MCP server works or what sqemes does for engineering teams.