> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.qodo.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Agentic Toolbox: Manage Standards tool

> Let your coding agent administer your organization's Review Standards, capture conventions as new rules, edit or retire existing ones, and triage pending suggestions.

<Badge color="outline-purple" size="sm" shape="pill">Beta</Badge>

Let your coding agent administer your organization's Review Standards, capture a convention as a new rule, edit or retire an existing one, re-scope it to a repository, and triage pending suggestions, all from the conversation.

Manage Standards is one of the tools in the [Agentic Toolbox](/agentic-toolbox/agentic-toolbox-overview). Review Standards is Qodo's umbrella term for the rules and pending suggestions that govern code quality and consistency across your repositories. Where `qodo-get-rules` is the read path, fetching relevant rules so your agent writes compliant code from the start, Manage Standards is the write path. Every command it runs changes workspace state, so it confirms with you before acting and runs bulk or destructive operations as a dry run first.

## Supported interfaces

The Agentic Toolbox is available through the following interfaces.

| **Interface**                | **Description**                                                                                                                                                                   |
| ---------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| CLI<br /><br />Agent skills  | Administer Qodo Review Standards from the command line or scripts, via the Qodo Agentic Toolbox installer.<br />Use Qodo tools from supported coding agents through agent skills. |
| Claude Code plugin           | Administer Qodo Review Standards within Claude Code.                                                                                                                              |
| Codex plugin<br />MCP Server | Access Qodo tools directly from Codex.<br />Connect any MCP-compatible client or coding agent.                                                                                    |

## What you can do

With Manage Standards, you can:

* Capture a convention you just agreed on in conversation as a new rule.
* Edit an existing rule's category, severity, or content.
* Activate, deactivate, or re-scope one or more rules for specific repositories.
* Triage the pending suggestions queue by accepting and activating suggestions or rejecting them.
* Run bulk operations (activate, deactivate, re-scope, accept, reject) across multiple rules, with a dry run first.

Whether a change takes effect immediately or becomes a pending suggestion depends on your permissions. Changes made by admins become active immediately, while rule changes created by other users are submitted as pending suggestions for approval. The skill tells you exactly what happened instead of assuming the change was successful.

## Common use cases

### Capture a convention as a rule

The strongest signal here is mid-conversation agreement where you and your agent just settled on a convention and want it enforced going forward.

Use it to:

* Turn a design discussion into an enforceable rule with a name, category, and severity.
* Set the right severity for how strict the rule should be: **error** (must comply), **warning** (comply by default), or **recommendation** (apply when appropriate).
* Scope the new rule to the current repository, or leave it universal if it should apply workspace-wide.

**Example prompts**

* "Make this a rule."
* "Make a rule for this repo that all new API endpoints must validate input with our schema library."
* "We just agreed no more raw SQL string concatenation. That should be an error-level rule."

### Edit or change the lifecycle of a rule

Once a rule exists, its content, severity, or state often needs to shift as the codebase and team do.

Use it to:

* Change what a rule checks for, or its category.
* Change the X rule to an error (or downgrade it to a warning or recommendation).
* Deactivate or disable a rule that's become noise.
* Re-scope a rule to a specific repository, or apply it more broadly.

**Example prompts**

* "Deactivate the tabs-vs-spaces rule, it's noise."
* "Change the console.log rule to an error."
* "Re-scope the error-format rule to this repo too."

### Triage pending suggestions and run bulk hygiene

Suggestions accumulate for someone to review; hygiene work, such as retiring rules tied to an archived repo, is naturally a batch operation.

Use it to:

* List and review suggestions waiting for approval.
* Accept and activate a suggestion, or reject it.
* Bulk deactivate, re-scope, activate, or reject across many rules at once. All bulk operations are previewed with a dry run before they run for real.

**Example prompts**

* "Show pending suggestions."
* "Let's triage suggestions."
* "Accept this suggestion." / "Reject this suggestion."
* "Bulk deactivate everything scoped to the archived repo."

## Frequently asked questions

**Who can use Manage Standards?**

Manage Standards is an opt-in skill (`recommended: false`), so it isn't enabled for all users by default because every command writes to your workspace's standards. You'll also need the Agentic Toolbox installed and authenticated (`qodo whoami`).

**What happens if I'm not an admin?**

You can still create rules, but they're submitted as pending suggestions instead of becoming active rules. This is expected platform behavior, not an error. An admin must approve the suggestion before it's enforced.

Other write operations, such as editing, deactivating, re-scoping, or triaging existing rules, require admin permissions. If you don't have the required permissions, the operation is declined.

**Is rejecting a suggestion reversible?**

No. Rejecting a suggestion permanently deletes it.

Before rejecting a suggestion or running any bulk operation, the skill performs a dry run and shows a summary of the affected rules before making changes. When your intent is ambiguous, it defaults to the reversible option, such as deactivating a rule instead of deleting it.

**How is this different from `qodo-get-rules`?**

`qodo-get-rules` is read-only. It retrieves and applies the rules relevant to your current task.

Manage Standards is the write counterpart. It lets you create, edit, activate, deactivate, re-scope, and triage rules and pending suggestions.

## Additional resources

* [Agentic Toolbox](/agentic-toolbox/agentic-toolbox-overview)