Scope and applyTo

The single most important feature of aiscope is scope-aware severity. It's the difference between a tool that flags every cross-file disagreement and a tool you actually trust to gate your CI.

What is a scope?

Every memory file has a scope — which files does this rule apply to? aiscope derives it from three sources:

  1. applyTo / globs frontmatter — explicit glob pattern(s).

    ---
applyTo: "**/*.py"
---

  2. alwaysApply: true — explicit "applies everywhere".

  3. File location — apps/web/AGENTS.md is implicitly scoped to apps/web/** because that's where it lives.

If none of these are present, the file applies everywhere.

When do scopes overlap?

Two scopes overlap if any path matches both. aiscope computes this with the globset crate.

Left scopeRight scopeOverlap?
**/*.py**/*.ts❌ no
**/*.py(everywhere)✅ yes
apps/web/**apps/api/**❌ no
apps/web/****/*.ts✅ yes
apps/**apps/web/**✅ yes

How it affects severity

If two files contradict each other but their scopes don't overlap, they can never both apply to the same source file — so it's not really a conflict. aiscope demotes such pairs to Low severity with a (scopes don't overlap) note.

This is what makes aiscope check safe to run in CI: it won't fail your build over a python.instructions.md vs typescript.instructions.md disagreement that can never actually confuse the model.

Tool-allowlist scope

For agents specifically, tools: defines which tools the agent is allowed to invoke:

---
name: reviewer
tools:
  - read
  - search
---

If an instruction file says "use the bash tool to run pytest" but no agent has bash in its allowlist, aiscope flags it as AgentToolMismatch.

See also