capabilities: choose which rule sets are active

paqad-ai capabilities shows and changes a project's active capabilities. A capability is a broad area of work that switches a set of Paqad's rules, agent roles and skills on for the project. There are three:

Capability	What it adds	How it is managed
content	Writing rules: markdown, writing style, code snippets in prose, attribution.	Always on. It cannot be removed.
coding	Software rules: architecture, code quality, code review, feature development, codebase health, and the stack-specific packs.	You add or remove it.
security	Security review material, such as penetration-test rules.	Follows coding automatically: on when coding is on, off when it is off. You cannot change it directly.

Onboarding sets the capabilities from what it detects: a code project gets all three, and a content-only project (Paqad's built-in content stack is short-video) gets content. Most teams never need this command. It is useful when detection got it wrong, or when a repository changes from content-only to code.

See the active capabilities

paqad-ai capabilities list [--project-root <path>]

Prints the project's active capabilities, one per line, from .paqad/project-profile.yaml. For a typical code project:

content
coding
security

If the project has not been onboarded, the command fails with Project profile not found.

See which capabilities you can change

paqad-ai capabilities available

Prints the capabilities you can pass to add and remove: content and coding. It does not need a project.

Add or remove a capability

paqad-ai capabilities add coding [--project-root <path>]
paqad-ai capabilities remove coding [--project-root <path>]

• Adding coding also turns on security.
• Removing coding also turns off security and clears the saved stack profile, because a project without coding has no code stack.
• Removing content is refused.
• Passing security is refused with a message telling you to manage coding instead. Any other name is refused as unknown.

These commands only update the capability list in .paqad/project-profile.yaml. They do not change any other file.

Apply the change to your rules

Changing capabilities does not regenerate anything by itself. The rules already copied into docs/instructions/rules/ stay as they are until you rebuild them:

paqad-ai refresh --rules           # shows what would change
paqad-ai refresh --rules --force   # applies it

Also note that paqad-ai refresh --stack resets the capabilities to what detection recommends, which can undo a manual change. See refresh and update.