nexus adopt — import existing project configs from any AI tool on day one

[canoo]

Problem

Developers who already have an established project with CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, or .kiro/steering/ files cannot easily adopt NEXUS without losing that work. The 'start from scratch' friction is the primary barrier to mid-project adoption.

Community research confirms this is a top pain point: developers describe 'copy-pasting their soul from one tool's rule file to another' when switching tools (r/LocalLLaMA, April 2026).

Solution

nexus adopt detects all existing AI tool config files in the current project, uses a large model to intelligently merge them into .nexus/source.md, then runs nexus sync to project back out in unified form.

Detection targets

Tool	Files detected
Claude Code	CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .claude/settings.json
Cursor	.cursor/rules/*.mdc, .cursorrules
Windsurf	.windsurfrules
Copilot	.github/copilot-instructions.md, .github/instructions/*.md
Kiro	.kiro/steering/*.md
Cline	.clinerules
Continue.dev	.continuerc.json, config.yaml
Aider	.aider.conf.yml
Amazon Q	.qrules

Merge strategy

1. Parse all detected files
2. Extract the instruction content (strip tool-specific syntax like Cursor @file references)
3. Flag conflicts (e.g. Cursor says 'always TypeScript', CLAUDE.md says 'prefer JSDoc')
4. Present conflicts to user for resolution
5. Write merged result to .nexus/source.md
6. Run nexus sync to project back to all tools
7. Archive original files to .nexus/.adopted/ (not deleted)

Dependencies

Requires #17 (driver system) and #81 (nexus sync).