This folder contains internal documentation about how the Strands team builds and maintains the SDK. These documents help contributors understand our design philosophy and decision-making process.

Document	Description
TENETS.md	Core principles that guide SDK design and implementation
DECISIONS.md	Record of design and API decisions with rationale
API_BAR_RAISING.md	Process for reviewing and approving API changes
FEATURE_LIFECYCLE.md	How features are added, marked experimental, and deprecated under semantic versioning
PR.md	Pull request description guidelines (applies to both SDKs)
COMPATIBILITY.md	What changes are not considered breaking under semantic versioning (both SDKs; Strands harness and the CLI are 0.x — see Strands harness versioning)
COMPLEXITY.md	Why PRs are labeled by cognitive complexity and how to keep code under the thresholds
AGENT_GUIDELINES.md	Guidelines for AI agents that interact with Strands repositories
designs/	Design proposals for significant features (RFC-style)

For Contributors

When proposing changes to the SDK, please review these documents to understand:

Tenets — The principles your contribution should align with
Decisions — Past decisions that may inform your approach
API Bar Raising — The review process for API changes
Agent Guidelines — Conventions for agents operating on our repos

If your contribution results in a new decision that could guide future work, consider adding it to DECISIONS.md.

README.md

Team Documentation

Contents

For Contributors