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A standard is a protocol that fires on a file rather than on a prompt. Where a domain matches what you typed, a standard matches what you are about to edit, and it injects on mutating operations rather than on every turn.
base std is the short alias.

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Where they come from

Why it works. Standards are authored in a protocols.md source and synced into standards.toml plus the graph. That is deliberately different from rules, which you add one at a time from the command line: a standard is usually a document that already exists, and the sync is what turns it into something that fires. The gotcha. There is no base standards add. If you want a new standard, write it into the protocols source and sync. Reaching for add and finding nothing is the most common first stumble here.

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Proving one will fire

Why it works. This is a dry run of the matcher against a real file. It prints the scores and what would inject, and it writes nothing and sends nothing. --content simulates the payload of an actual edit, which matters because a standard can match on what you are writing as well as on which file you are writing it to. The gotcha. Test before you rely on one. A standard that does not fire is indistinguishable from a standard that fired and had nothing to say, and this command is the only thing that separates them.

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Which files a standard covers

Since 0.16.0 a standard applies only to the files it declares, so writing a markdown note no longer draws a coding standard:
code = true covers every file in a language the code map covers. extensions (with or without the dot), languages (as the matcher names them: dockerfile, yaml, toml, json and so on) and paths add more; paths are globs, case ignored, and a glob with no / matches the file name. A file is in scope when any one of them admits it. A standard that declares nothing applies to code files only, never to .md, .txt, .json, .toml, .yaml or .csv documents. The shipped standards cover code plus their deploy and CI files, and a standards.toml written before scopes existed takes the shipped scope for those standards when it loads, without the file being rewritten. Paths are compared with / separators, so .github/workflows/** matches on Windows too.

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Seeing what is loaded

Every standard with its trigger and annotation counts, and since 0.16.0 what it applies to. A standard with zero triggers will never fire, which is worth noticing before you spend an afternoon wondering why. base standards get <id> shows one in full.

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Where standards fit

Three mechanisms, three different moments. Standards are the one that reaches you while you are changing something rather than while you are asking about it.

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Rules and domains

The keyword-triggered half of the same idea.

Context reference

Every base standards verb and flag.