copyroom-adopt

name	copyroom-adopt
description	Adopt or templatize an existing repo — bring a hand-written repo under template management with copyroom adopt / templatize, and read the drift report.
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Adopt / templatize / layer an existing repo

CopyRoom brings an existing, hand-written repo — one with no CopyRoom markers — under template management. Three paths. Pick by two questions: does a template exist, and are its files already in the repo?

Situation	Command
Template exists, and the repo already looks like it	copyroom adopt <template> --ref <ref> [--answers <file>] [--write]
Template exists, and its files are not in the repo yet	copyroom layer add <template> [--ref <ref>]
No template yet	copyroom templatize [--into PATH] → parameterize (copyroom golden loop) → finalize (git init + tag) → copyroom adopt

adopt records a link. layer add places files. Agents confuse these two most often. adopt is report-only: it never writes the template's content into the repo. Use adopt to install a template and you get an answers file and nothing else. To place the files, use layer add.

layer add also gives a repo a second template. The personal layer (my-ai) carries the user's AGENTS.md seed, CLAUDE.md symlink, and personal skills. It sits beside the genome that generated the repo. Run copyroom layer list first. It reports which templates already manage the repo. Full model: docs/user/layers.md.

The template is named or extracted, never guessed — CopyRoom will not fuzzy-match a registry.

Rules

• Adoption is report-only unless --write. It never modifies an existing repo file: report-only adds only the reviewable patch under .copyroom/adopt/; --write additionally adds .copier-answers.yml. Drift is information, not a problem to auto-fix; there is no --reconcile.
• The template source must be a git repository (a ref must be renderable).
• adopt refuses an already-managed repo unless --force. The refusal is per layer. A genome's .copier-answers.yml does not block --layer my-ai.
• layer add overwrites the files its template ships. It must: Copier prompts on each conflict and fails when stdin is not a terminal. layer add is the apply step. Run copyroom update --layer <name> afterwards to converge; that step three-way-merges. Neither step overwrites a file the template declares in _skip_if_exists, such as AGENTS.md.
• Update the genome before you add an overlay layer. The genome and the personal layer both ship AGENTS.md. Whichever lands first seeds it. Adding the overlay to a repo that is behind its genome costs one avoidable merge. Order does not matter when the repo is current or already owns an AGENTS.md.
• Author the --answers file yourself from the template's copier.yml; --write only records the link once the drift report looks right. (--answers is optional — questions it leaves out fall back to the template's defaults — but authoring it explicitly is the reliable path.)

The drift report has three parts: Template adds (files the template produces that the repo lacks), Differs (divergent content), and Repo-only (the repo's legitimately-extra content). A reviewable patch lands under .copyroom/adopt/.

Detail: docs/user/adoption.md (adopt/templatize) and docs/user/layers.md (layer add, update --layer) — read them before running the arc.

For when to adopt vs. scaffold a new project, see the copyroom skill.