Context

studies/open-specs-and-standards/ started as a quick reading list and is now ten upstream submodules plus a README and an inquiry note. Continuing to keep each upstream registered as a direct submodule of ai-labs makes ai-labs’s .gitmodules noisy and forces ai-labs to own change-pointers for ten unrelated spec repos. Promoting the directory into its own repo (lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards) gives the study its own history, lets us add study-specific tooling (trees, parsers, scripts, README sections) without touching ai-labs, and reduces ai-labs’s .gitmodules to a single entry for the study.

The 10 nested submodules are currently staged but never committed in ai-labs, which is the easiest possible starting point — there is no historical ai-labs commit that pins their SHAs, so we can detach them losslessly.

Outcome

After this migration:

A new public repo https://github.com/lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards exists, with its own .gitmodules containing the 10 upstream submodules (absolute URLs), a README.md, and a context-v/ directory.
ai-labs/.gitmodules no longer lists the 10 upstream specs. Instead it has a single new entry: studies/open-specs-and-standards → https://github.com/lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards.git.
ai-labs is left with its studies/open-specs-and-standards submodule staged but uncommitted on the development branch, for the user to review before committing.

Non-goals (do not touch)

.claude/settings.local.json (currently staged add — leave alone)
investment-memo-orchestrator submodule pointer (currently modified — leave alone)
memopop-ai submodule pointer (currently modified — leave alone)
The four pre-existing ai-labs submodules: packages/mermaid-js-ai-agent, packages/Perplexica, investment-memo-orchestrator, memopop-ai.

Phase 1 — Detach the 10 study submodules from ai-labs

Working directory: /Users/mpstaton/code/lossless-monorepo/ai-labs

The submodules are staged-adds, never committed. The canonical primitive for this state is git rm --cached, which removes the gitlink from the index and auto-stages the corresponding .gitmodules deletion in one shot. Do not use git restore --staged (would diverge index and .gitmodules) or git submodule deinit (only valid for committed submodules; these aren’t).

Save the work that should travel with the new repo:

mkdir -p /tmp/study-migration
cp studies/open-specs-and-standards/README.md /tmp/study-migration/README.md
cp -r studies/open-specs-and-standards/context-v /tmp/study-migration/context-v

Remove each of the 10 staged submodule gitlinks from the index:

for name in 12-factor-agents agent-2-agent agents-md ai-skills design-md \
            frictionless-specs llms-txt modelcontextprotocol open-spec spec-kit; do
  git rm --cached -f "studies/open-specs-and-standards/$name"
done

Verify .gitmodules no longer has those 10 entries (only the four unrelated entries remain) and that git diff --cached .gitmodules shows the deletions are staged:
```
cat .gitmodules
git diff --cached .gitmodules | head -60
```

Remove the working-tree directory and the modules cache:

rm -rf studies/open-specs-and-standards
rm -rf .git/modules/studies/open-specs-and-standards

Sanity-check that .git/config has no leftover submodule.studies.* keys (there shouldn’t be any since the adds were never committed, but verify):
```
git config --get-regexp '^submodule\.studies\.' || echo "clean"
```

Phase 2 — Build the new study repo locally

Working directory: /Users/mpstaton/code/lossless-monorepo/ai-labs/studies/open-specs-and-standards

Re-create the directory and initialize:

mkdir -p studies/open-specs-and-standards
cd studies/open-specs-and-standards
git init -b main

Restore the user content:

cp /tmp/study-migration/README.md ./README.md
cp -r /tmp/study-migration/context-v ./context-v

Add a minimal .gitignore (covering OS cruft and the typical study-time junk; mirroring the spirit of ai-labs’s .gitignore):
```
.DS_Store
node_modules
.venv
venv
__pycache__
.env
```

Add the 10 upstream submodules (absolute URLs — the Plan agent confirmed ../ relative paths would resolve to the wrong org for these external repos):

git submodule add https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents.git 12-factor-agents
git submodule add https://github.com/a2aproject/A2A.git agent-2-agent
git submodule add https://github.com/agentsmd/agents.md.git agents-md
git submodule add https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git ai-skills
git submodule add https://github.com/google-labs-code/design.md.git design-md
git submodule add https://github.com/frictionlessdata/specs.git frictionless-specs
git submodule add https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/llms-txt.git llms-txt
git submodule add https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol.git modelcontextprotocol
git submodule add https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec.git open-spec
git submodule add https://github.com/github/spec-kit.git spec-kit

Stage and commit (explicit paths only — never git add -A):

git add .gitignore README.md context-v .gitmodules \
        12-factor-agents agent-2-agent agents-md ai-skills design-md \
        frictionless-specs llms-txt modelcontextprotocol open-spec spec-kit
git commit -m "study(open-specs-and-standards): seed study repo with 10 upstream specs and inquiry"

Phase 3 — Create remote and push

Still inside studies/open-specs-and-standards/:

gh repo create lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards \
  --public \
  --description "A study of open specs and standards for human+agent file-based cooperation." \
  --source . \
  --remote origin \
  --push

Verify:

gh repo view lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards --json url,visibility,defaultBranchRef

Phase 4 — Re-attach as a single submodule of ai-labs

Working directory: /Users/mpstaton/code/lossless-monorepo/ai-labs

The newly-pushed repo is now the source of truth. We need ai-labs to track it as a fresh submodule. The cleanest path is to remove the local working dir (its .git is bound to itself, not ai-labs) and let git submodule add re-clone it.

cd /Users/mpstaton/code/lossless-monorepo/ai-labs
rm -rf studies/open-specs-and-standards

git submodule add https://github.com/lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards.git \
  studies/open-specs-and-standards

Initialize the nested submodules in the freshly-cloned study (so the working tree is fully populated locally):
```
git submodule update --init --recursive studies/open-specs-and-standards
```
Verify ai-labs’s .gitmodules now has the four pre-existing entries plus one new entry for studies/open-specs-and-standards, and zero entries for the 10 individual specs:
```
grep -c '^\[submodule' .gitmodules   # expect 5
grep 'studies/open-specs-and-standards' .gitmodules
```
Inspect what’s staged for the eventual ai-labs commit (do not commit; the user wants to review):
```
git status --short
git diff --cached .gitmodules
```

Phase 5 — Verification

End-to-end checks before handing back:

gh repo view lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards returns the repo as public with a default branch main.
Cloning the new repo into a scratch dir works and --recurse-submodules pulls all 10 nested specs: bash mkdir -p /tmp/study-roundtrip && cd /tmp/study-roundtrip git clone --recurse-submodules \ https://github.com/lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards.git ls study-open-specs-and-standards/12-factor-agents | head -5
In ai-labs, studies/open-specs-and-standards/.git is a file whose gitdir points into .git/modules/studies/open-specs-and-standards/ (confirms it is correctly registered as a submodule of ai-labs).
In ai-labs, the four unrelated changes from before this migration are still present and unmodified: .claude/settings.local.json (A), investment-memo-orchestrator (MM), memopop-ai (MM).
git status in ai-labs shows the new submodule entry staged but uncommitted.

Critical files

ai-labs/.gitmodules — edited indirectly via git rm --cached and git submodule add
ai-labs/.git/modules/studies/open-specs-and-standards/ — directory to delete in Phase 1
ai-labs/studies/open-specs-and-standards/README.md — preserve through migration (already contains the curated study description)
ai-labs/studies/open-specs-and-standards/context-v/inquiry/Filesystem-Naming-Conventions.md — preserve through migration

Rollback

If anything goes wrong before Phase 3’s gh repo create, recovery is local:

The 10 submodule directories can be re-cloned by re-running the original git submodule add ... commands in ai-labs (the URLs are documented in Phase 2).
The README and context-v/ are backed up at /tmp/study-migration/.

If something goes wrong after the GitHub repo is created, options:

gh repo delete lossless-group/study-open-specs-and-standards --yes and start over (only safe if no one else has cloned it yet).
Or fix forward: amend commits and git push --force on the new repo’s main (only if no collaborators have pulled).

Notes for downstream users of ai-labs

After this migration, anyone cloning ai-labs needs:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/lossless-group/lossless-ai-labs.git
# or, post-clone:
git submodule update --init --recursive

This was already true (because ai-labs has had submodules), but the double-nesting now makes the --recursive flag mandatory if they want to pull all the way through to the study’s nested specs. Worth a one-line note in ai-labs’s top-level README.