Start from template and project level instructions

[AndrewMead10]

What problem or use case are you trying to solve?

I want to be able to start a project from a template that i have created (it has a frontend and backend structure like auth and components already installed). I also want to be able to give instructions for the AI to follow on a project level, like you can with the .cursorrules file. That way the AI will be structuring the code the way I expect and allow for easier code review and better more maintainable code for me.

Describe the UX of the solution you'd like
When choosing to open a project, start a new one, or load one from github, allow a load as template flag which will then clone/ copy the folder to the new project path and then open as normal.

For the .currsorrules analog, you could just make a .openhands file that would be used as the base rules for the project.

Do you have thoughts on the technical implementation?
For project creation from a template, I would expect its fairly similar to the existing new project workflow.

For the .openhands file, I am not super familiar with the agents and what info they specifically need, but the naive solution I would think is just appending the .openhands file to the system prompt for the LLM calls.

Describe alternatives you've considered
For starting from a template, existing load folder or github modifies the content of the original folder or repo, which we dont want to do if we are using a template.

You could prompt the AI with the project specific project context every time, but that seems a bit cumbersome.

[mamoodi]

The project level instructions is available: https://docs.all-hands.dev/modules/usage/prompting/microagents-repo.