AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

by ghuntley • 11 months ago

837 381 11 months ago

I'm still not convinced that separating README.md and AGENTS.md is a good idea.

diggan• 11 months ago

At this point, README.md becomes the "marketing/landing page markdown" and AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md becomes the ones you visit to get an overview of the actual code/architecture/usage.

andyferris3• 11 months ago

For ages, many projects have README.md for marketing/landing page (i.e. users) and CONTRIBUTING.md for developers.

Why we don't treat coding agents as developers and have them reading CONTRIBUTING.md is baffling to me.

stingraycharles3• 11 months ago

It is. README is for humans, AGENTS / etc is for LLMs.

Document how to use and install your tool in the readme.

Document how to compile, test, architecture decisions, coding standards, repository structure etc in the agents doc.

darepublic2• 11 months ago

Compile, test, architecture would be very welcome in the readme too Id wager

sponnath• 11 months ago

Why would these things not be relevant for humans?

crazylogger• 11 months ago

We have CONTRIBUTING.md for that. Seems to me the author just doesn't know about it?

furyofantares• 11 months ago

There's a lot of shit in my claude.md that would be condescending to a human. Some of it I don't even mean, it's just there to correct egregious patterns the model loves to do. I'm not gonna write "never write fallback code" in my readme, but it saves a lot of time to prevent claude from constantly writing code that would silently fail if it got past me because it contains a fallback path with hardcoded fake data.

blinkymach125• 11 months ago

I had the same thought as I read this example. Everything in the AGENTS.md file should just be in a good README.md file.

esafak3• 11 months ago

My READMEs don't have things like "don't run the whole test suite unless I instruct you to because it will take too long; run targeted tests instead".

sothatsit2• 11 months ago

You're going to include specific coding style rules in your README? Or other really agent-specific things like guidance about spawning sub-agents?

They are separate for a good reason. My CLAUDE.md and README.md look very different.

petesergeant2• 11 months ago

Perhaps. I let Claude put whatever it wants in its Claude file and check it’s not batshit from time to time, where I’m very protective of the high-quality README I write for humans. The Claude file has stuff that would be obvious to a human and weird to jam into the README (we use .spec.ts not .test.ts) but that Claude needs in order to get things right.

trailrunner46• 11 months ago

One reason to consider is around context usage with LLMs. Less is generally better and README.md files are often too much text some of which I don’t want in every context window.

I find AGENT.md and similar functioning files for LLMs in my projects contains concise and specific commands around feedback loops such as testing, build commands, etc. Yes these same commands might be in a README.md but often there is a lot more text that I don’t want in the context window being sent with every turn to the LLM.

kaycebasques• 11 months ago

I've also been debating this: https://technicalwriting.dev/ai/agents/#gotta-keep-em-separa...

(Quoting from that post)

Arguments in favor of keeping them separated:

* Writing style. In agent docs, using all caps might be an effective way to emphasize a particular instruction. In internal eng docs, this might come off rude or distracting.

* Conciseness vs. completeness. In agent docs, you likely need to keep the content highly curated. If you put in too much content, you’ll blast through your API quotas quickly and will probably reduce LLM output quality. In internal eng docs, we ideally aim for 100% completeness. I.e. every important design decision, API reference, workflow, etc. is documented somewhere.

* Differing knowledge needs. The information that LLMs need help with is not the same as the information that human engineers need help with. For example, Gemini 2.5 Pro has pretty good built-in awareness of Pigweed’s C++ Style Guide. I tested that assertion by invoking the Gemini API and instructing it Recite the Pigweed C++ Guide in its entirety. It did not recite in full, but it gave a detailed summary of all the points. So the Gemini 2.5 Pro API was either trained on the style guide, or it’s able to retrieve the style guide when needed. Therefore, it’s not necessary to include the full style guide as AGENTS.md context. (Credit to Keir Mierle for this idea.)

Arguments against:

* Duplication. Conceptually, agent docs are a subset of internal eng docs. The underlying goal is the same. You’re documenting workflows and knowledge that’s important to the team. But now you need to maintain that same information in two different doc sets.

CGamesPlay• 11 months ago

Writing style. In agent docs, using all caps might be an effective way to emphasize a particular instruction. In internal eng docs, this might come off rude or distracting.

To pile on to this, an agent needs to see "ABSOLUTELY NEVER do suchandsuch" to not do suchandsuch, but still has a pretty fair chance of doing it by accident. A talented human seeing "ABSOLUTELY NEVER do suchandsuch" will interpret this to mean there are consequences to doing suchandsuch, like being fired or causing production downtime. So the same message will be received differently by the different types of readers.

ghuntley2• 11 months ago

Using all caps will actually cause GPT-5 to not function effectively. Have a look at the GPT-5 tuning documentation for coding.

lmeyerov• 11 months ago

We find it useful:

* Agents still kinda suck so need the help around context management and avoiding foot guns. Eg, we make a < 500loc ai/readme.md with must haves, links to others, and meta how-to-use

* Similar to IaaC, useful to separate out as not really ready the same way we read it, and many markdowns are really scripts written in natural language, eg, plan.md.template

rogeliodh• 11 months ago

Some time ago a lot of projects had a README and a BUILD/README.build/DEVELOPMENT file... I think AGENTS.md is more akin to this last file.

eats_indigo• 11 months ago

In what way is this a format or standard? It's just markdown in a namespce

tptacek2• 11 months ago

You could get this page down to under 100 words by simply having it say "the name of the file LLM agents will look at for instructions on the repo is AGENTS.md; that's it, that's the standard".

It's a real problem! Every agent right now has their own weird filename. I love David Crawshaw's sketch.dev, but for reasons passing understanding they choose "dear_llm.md" for theirs.

esafak3• 11 months ago

I created a ticket for adding AGENTS.md support.

edit: They're on it. Not everything has to be complex; sometimes somebody just has to do it.

ethan_smith• 11 months ago

Standards derive their value precisely from being simple and widely adopted - think of .gitignore, CONTRIBUTING.md, or LICENSE files that work because everyone agrees on their location and purpose.

chrismorgan3• 11 months ago

.gitignore is not a standard: it’s a format used by one tool. A few other tools piggy-back on it (e.g. ripgrep ignores paths matching in .gitignore, .hgignore, &c. by default), not infrequently to confusion.

CONTRIBUTING.md is not a standard: it’s a convention pushed by one platform, used by some projects (but many more will not write down such information, or put it in a README file, or put it in some other documentation).

LICENSE is definitely not a standard: it’s one of a wide variety of names people use to hold licensing information, which some tools will be able to detect. I just looked through my /usr/share/licenses, of 1135 files, only 300 are named LICENSE—it’s the most popular single name, sure, with COPYING next at 182, but it’s still definitely a minority, though in certain ecosystems it may be more popular. Any license-detection tooling will be scanning for a lot more file names. “LICENSE” is a very weak convention, compared with the others.

arrowsmith• 11 months ago

All the different coding agents put their "rules" in different places: .cursor, CLAUDE.md etc..

It makes no sense and it really needs standardisation. I hope this catches on.

cma• 11 months ago

As a workaround you can add a wrapper launcher script that symlinks them and then removes the symlink after you exit

stingraycharles3• 11 months ago

Yet every agent I use (Claude Code, Gemini and Aider) uses their own custom filename.

It would be nice if it was standardized. Right now I’m using ruler to automate generating these files for all standards as a necessary evil, but I don’t envision this problem being solved soon. Especially because these coding agents also use different styles for consuming MCP configs.

https://github.com/intellectronica/ruler

ameliaquining3• 11 months ago

Jules uses AGENTS.md, which indicates that Google is on board with it as the standard. If Gemini Code Assist continues to be a thing (I'm not sure whether Jules is intended to succeed it) then presumably it will support AGENTS.md as well. In the meantime you can configure Gemini Code Assist to use an arbitrary filename.

I don't see a reference to a specific filename in Aider's documentation, can you link to it?

Anthropic appears to be the major holdout here.

4b11b43• 11 months ago

While I understand why... ruler seems like something we should not need

conradkay• 11 months ago

My (slightly cynical) take is that they're trying to create whatever vendor lock-in they can, so standardization feels hits a bit too close to commoditization

sergiotapia2• 11 months ago

New Phoenix Framework projects have an AGENTS.md file in the root! It's really cool. https://x.com/alkadaemon/status/1955348410145358199

chrismorgan3• 11 months ago

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/main/instal...

That’s insane. 3000 words of prose boilerplate about the language and framework. Sounds like you need, at the very least, some sort of import directive. I have no idea if “Read and follow the instructions in path/to/phoenixframework/AGENTS.md.” would work.

And then the eclectic mixture of instructions with a variety of ways of trying to bully an intransigent LLM into ignoring its Phoenix-deficient training… ugh.

sergiotapia2• 11 months ago

Works great, why the _ugh_

Ultimately that's what matters.

joshwa• 11 months ago

The thing about language models is that they are *language* models. They don't actually parse XML structure, or turn code into an AST, they are just next-token generators.

Individual models may have supplemented their training with things that look like structure (e.g. Claude with its XMLish delimiters), but it's far from universal.

Ultimately if we want better fidelity to the concepts we're referencing, we're better off working from the larger/richer dataset of token sequences in the training data--the total published written output of humanity.

thrown-08258• 11 months ago

dont forget, you pay real money every time it is tokenized with every prompt!

alphazard• 11 months ago

Isn't the promise of AI that we don't have to adhere to precise formats? We can just write it down in whatever format makes the most sense to us, and any impedance mismatch is on the machine to figure out?

sqs3• 11 months ago

Just the filename is standardized. The contents aren't, which is exactly right. From the site:

Are there required fields?
No. AGENTS.md is just standard Markdown. Use any headings you like; the agent simply parses the text you provide.

4b11b43• 11 months ago

No, structure and format matters, even if it may not be precise code syntax

seb12042• 11 months ago

Still need to write it down to make it explicit. The longer the writing gets the more a structured approach is suitable for the human writing and maintaining the instructions.

blinkymach125• 11 months ago

We're in a transition phase today where agents need special guidance to understand a codebase that go beyond what humans need. Before long, I don't think they will. I think we should focus on our own project documentation being comprehensive (e.g. the contents of this AGENTS.md are appropriate to live somewhere in our documentation), but we should always write for humans.

The LLM's whole shtick is that it can read and comprehend our writing, so let's architect for it at that level.

tptacek2• 11 months ago

It's not just understanding the codebase, it's also stylistic things, like "use this assert library to write tests", or "never write comments", or "use structured logging". It's just as useful --- more so even --- on fresh projects without much code.

naniwaduni2• 11 months ago

... most of which would also be valuable information to communicate when onboarding new devs.

time0ut• 11 months ago

Honestly, everything I have written in markdown files as AI context fodder is stuff that I write down for human contributors anyway. Or at least stuff I want to always write down, but maybe only halfway do. The difference now is it is actually being read, seemingly understood, and often followed!

nfw2• 11 months ago

Stylistic preferences could usually be inferred by just looking at the code. Perhaps if code is mid-refactor there may be inconsistencies, but ideal ai coding agent could also look through git history

vFunct3• 11 months ago

We're in a transition phase today where agents need special guidance to understand a codebase that go beyond what humans need. Before long, I don't think they will.

This isn't guaranteed. Just like we will never have fully self-driving cars, we likely won't have fully human quality coders.

Right now AI coders are going to be another tool in the tool bucket.

CuriouslyC2• 11 months ago

Have you taken a Waymo?

blinkymach125• 11 months ago

I don't think the bar here is a human level coder, I think the bar is an LLM which reads and follows the README.md.

If we're otherwise assuming it reads and follows an AGENTS.md file, then following the README.md should be within reach.

I think our task is to ensure that our README.md is suitable for any developer to onboard into the codebase. We can then measure our LLMs (and perhaps our own documentation) by if that guidance is followed.

Mtinie2• 11 months ago

Just like we will never have fully self-driving cars, we likely won't have fully human quality coders.

“Never is a long time...and none of us lives to see its length.” Elizabeth Yates, A Place for Peter (Mountain Born, #3)

“Never is an awfully long time.” J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

TZubiri3• 11 months ago

This applies to mcp too

rr808• 11 months ago

One of the most common usages I see from colleagues is to get agents to write the comments so you can go full circle. :)

joegibbs• 11 months ago

I think they'll always need special guidance for things like business logic. They'll never know exactly what it is that you're building and why, what the end goal of the project is without you telling them. Architectural stuff is also a matter of human preference: if you have it mapped out in your head where things should go and how they should be done, it will be better for you when reading the changes, which will be the real bottleneck.

fritzo• 11 months ago

Indeed I have observed that my coworkers "never know exactly what it is that [we]'re building and why, what the end goal of the project is without [me] telling them"

goosejuice4• 11 months ago

I suspect machine readable practices will become standard as AI is incorporated more into society.

A good example is autonomous driving and local laws / context. "No turn on red. School days 7am-9am".

So you need: where am I, when are school days for this specific school, and what datetime it is. You could attempt to gather that through search. Though more realistically I think the municipality will make the laws require less context, or some machine readable (e.g. qrcode) transfer of information will be on the sign. If they don't there's going to be a lot of rule breaking.

username2232• 11 months ago

Very strong "reverse centaur" vibes here, in the sense of humans becoming servants to machines, instead of vice versa. Not that I think making things more machine-readable is a waste of time, but you have to keep in mind the amount of human time sacrificed.

iknowstuff2• 11 months ago

Those particular signs are just stupid. The street should be redesigned with traffic calming, narrowing and chicanes so that speeding is not possible.

Slapping on a sign is ineffective

monkeydust• 11 months ago

Also see this happening, what does that mean for business specifications? Does it become close to code syntax itself?

deadbabe2• 11 months ago

That seems anachronistic, form over function. Machines should be able to access an API that returns “signs” for their given location. These signs don’t need any real world presence and can be updated instantly.

4b11b43• 11 months ago

I agree with this general sentiment, but there might be some things you want to force into the context every time via a specific agent file.

mvkel• 11 months ago

This is mostly true if the existing codebase is largely self documented, which is rare

theletterf• 11 months ago

Yes! That was precisely my point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837875

seb12042• 11 months ago

Unless we write down on the what we often consider implicit the LLM will not know it. There might be the option to deduce some implicit requirements from the code but unlikely 100%. Thus making the requirements explicit is the go.

jillesvangurp• 11 months ago

Here's a prompt I wrote a few days ago for codex:

  Analyze the repository and add a suitable agents.md

It did a decent job. I didn't really have much to add to that. I guess, having this file is a nice optimization but obviously it doesn't contain anything it wasn't able to figure out by itself. What's really needed is a per repository learning base that gets populated with facts the agents discovers during it's many experiments with the repository over the course of many conversations. It's a performance optimization.

The core problem is that every conversation is like ground hog day. You always start from scratch. Agents.md is a stop gap solution for that problem. Chatgpt actually has some notional memory that works across conversations. But it's a bit flaky, slow, and limited. It doesn't really learn across conversations.

That btw. is a big missing piece on the path to AGIs. There are some imperfect workarounds but a lot of knowledge is lost in between conversations. And the trick of just growing the amount of context we give to our prompts doesn't seem like it's the solution.

athrowaway3z• 11 months ago

I see the groundhog day problem as a feature, not a bug.

It's an organizational challenge, requiring a top level overview and easy to find sub documentation - and clear directives to use them when the AI starts architecting on a fresh start.

Overall, it's a good sign when a project is understandable in small independent chunks that don't demand a programmer/llm take in more context than was referenced.

I think the sweet spot would be all agents agree on a MUST-READ reference syntax for inside comments & docs that through simple scanning forces the file into the context. eg

// See @{../docs/payment-flow.md} for the overall design.

criley22• 11 months ago

Your prompt is pretty basic. Both Claude Code and Github Copilot having similar features. Claude Code has `init` which has a lot of special sauce in the prompt to improve the CLAUDE.md. And github copilot added a self-documenting prompt as well that runs on new repos, and you can see their prompt here https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/configure-custom-...

Reading their prompt gives ideas on how you can improve yours.

kissgyorgy2• 11 months ago

Not at all. Good documentation for humans are working well for models too, but they need so much more details and context to be reliable than humans that it needs a different style of description.

This needs to contain things that you would never write for humans. They also do stupid things which need to be adjusted by these descriptions.

criley22• 11 months ago

Better to work with the tools we have instead of the tools we might one day have. If you want agents to work well today, you need to build for the agents we have today.

We may never achieve your future where context is unlimited, models are trained on your codebase specifically, and tokens are cheap enough to use all of this. We might have a bubble pop and in a few years we could all be paying 5-10X current prices (read: the actual cost) for similar functionality to today. In that reality, how many years of inferior agent behavior do you tolerate before you give up hoping that it will evolve past needing the tweaks?

_mu5• 11 months ago

Make sure to check out https://agent-rules.org/ as well for more background on this initiative. More and more tools are adopting the standard.

Amp used to have an "RFC 9999" article on their website for this as well but the link now appears to be broken.

You can symlink your Cursor / Windsurf / whatever rules to AGENTS.md for backwards compatibility.

sqs3• 11 months ago

That draft RFC you mention is superseded by https://agents.md. Now that Amp uses AGENTS.md (https://x.com/sqs/status/1957945824404729997), I made all the former agent file stuff on https://ampcode.com just redirect to https://agents.md.

_mu5• 11 months ago

Gotcha - this is what I had in my history: https://ampcode.com/AGENT.md

For me, that gives a 404 with no obvious way to get to https://agents.md, I think either a hyperlink or redirect would be nice to have as well.

tomComb4• 11 months ago

Ok, I looked at your agent-rules and it sounds good except for a couple things ...

"Guidance for Use"

Your preference for bullet lists over headers is odd. This comes down to what works best with the models - they are interpreting it. This is a moving target. If you believe that your suggestion works best you should provide some sort of evidence. The default would be to not even get into that sort of thing.

Non-Hierarchical AGENTS.md

Claude-code, Gemini, and GHCP all support hierarchical context files. Your proposal and this new one from OpenAI and friends do not, and I think that is a shame.

_mu5• 11 months ago

I did not write agent-rules, I'm just linking to it.

_mu5• 11 months ago

I think this is a good thing - I would like to see the same pattern standardized for the memory system of all the different agents.

spawarotti• 11 months ago

At this point AGENTS.md is a README.md with enough hype behind it to actually motivate people to populate it with contents. People were too lazy to write docs for other people, but funnily enough are ok with doing it for robots.

This situation reminds me a bit of ergonomic handles design. Designed for a few people, preferred by everyone.

nicklo• 11 months ago

I think it’s the reverse - people were too lazy to read the docs so nobody was motivated to write them.

With an agent I know if I write once to CLAUDE.md and it will be read by 1000’s of agents in a week.

blinkymach125• 11 months ago

I like this insight. We kind of always knew that we wanted good docs, but they're demotivating to maintain if people aren't reading them. LLMs by their nature won't be onboarded to the codebase with meetings and conversations, so if we want them to have a proper onboarding then we're forced to be less lazy with our docs, and we get the validation of knowing they're being used.

wfhrto• 11 months ago

The difference now is that people are actively trying to remove people (others and themselves) from software development work, so the robots have to have adequate instructions. The motivation is bigger. To dismantle all human involvement with software development is something that everyone wants, and they want it yesterday.

samename• 11 months ago

everyone? source?

yanis_t• 11 months ago

I still don't get why it can't be just README.md. Just make sure it's minimal bullshit inside.

whywhywhywhy2• 11 months ago

I mean the agents are to lazy to read any of this anyway and often will forget the sort of instructions being spam these with after 3 more instructions too.

TZubiri3• 11 months ago

Protocols for llms are funny because they are designed to accept any text as input and they don't really implement the protocol anyways, so it's just a consumer side restriction of the input space.

tomComb4• 11 months ago

I think we lost something pretty big in this formulation.

With Claude code and others, if I put a context file (agent.MD or whatever) in a project subfolder, e.g., something explaining my database model in with the related code, it gets added to the root project context when the agent is using that subfolder.

It sounds to me like this formulation doesn’t support that.

neuronexmachina• 11 months ago

That's sort of this? I guess the exact behavior would depend on the agent.

Place another AGENTS.md inside each package. Agents automatically read the nearest file in the directory tree, so the closest one takes precedence and every subproject can ship tailored instructions. For example, at time of writing the main OpenAI repo has 88 AGENTS.md files.

tomComb4• 11 months ago

But no, that's the opposite - here sub-context files REPLACE the ones above it rather then augmenting it - and I think that deviating in this way is kinda' dangerous in that user's might not notice this difference.

CharlesW2• 11 months ago

This should've been an .agents¹ with an index.md.

For tiny, throwaway projects, a monolithic .md file is fine. A folder allows more complex projects to use "just enough hierarchy" to provide structure, with index.md as the entry point. Along with top-level universal guidance, it can include an organization guide (easily maintained with the help of LLMs).

  index.md
  ├── auth.md
  ├── performance.md
  ├── code_quality
  ├── data_layer
  ├── testing
  └── etc

In my experience, this works loads better than the "one giant file" method. It lets LLMs/agents add relevant context without wasting tokens on unrelated context, reduces noise/improves response accuracy, and is easier to maintain for both humans and LLMs alike.

¹ Ideally with a better name than ".agents", like ".codebots" or ".context".

asabla• 11 months ago

Been using a similar setup, with so far pretty decent results. With the addition of having a short explanation for each file within index.md

I've been experimenting with having a rules.md file within each directory where I want a certain behavior. Example, let us say I have a directory with different kind of services like realtime-service.ts and queue-service.ts, I then have a rules.md file on the same level as they are.

This lets me scaffold things pretty fast when prompting by just referencing that file. The name is probably not the best tho.

riffic2• 11 months ago

.well-known/

echelon2• 11 months ago

This. Projects need to stop inventing their own root level files and directories.

Stop polluting the root dir.

I'm not a fan of the name "well-known", but at least it's a convention [1].

I think it'd be great if we took something like XDG [2] and made it common for repositories, build scripts, package managers, tooling configs, etc.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8615

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory

jitix• 11 months ago

I like this idea. Do you have any middleware in your current setup that added the contents of this directory to the agent prompt?

tortilla2• 11 months ago

I'm building a little tool like this for myself. It's almost ready to be open-sourced. Just need to clean up some code and write better documentation.

CharlesW2• 11 months ago

I'd be interested in smarter ways of doing this, but currently I just use my CLAUDE.local.md to serve as the index.md in my example. It includes the 'specialist' .md files with their relative paths and descriptions, and tells Claude Code to use these when planning.

I also have explicit `xnew`, `xplan`, `xcode` and `xcheck` commands in CLAUDE.md that reinforce this. For example, here's my `xnew`:

  ## Remember Shortcuts
  Remember the following shortcuts, which the user may invoke at any time.
  
  ### XNEW
  When I type "xnew", this means:

  ```Understand all BEST PRACTICES listed in CLAUDE.md.
  Your code SHOULD ALWAYS follow these best practices.
  REVIEW relevant documentation in .agents/ before starting new work.
  Your code SHOULD use existing patterns and architectural decisions
  documented there rather than creating new approaches.```

p1necone2• 11 months ago

I've been trying to keep my baked in llm instructions to a terse ~100 line file, mostly headered sections with 5 or so bullet points each. Covering basic expectations for architecture, test mocking, approach to large changes etc. I can see why for some projects that wouldn't be enough but I feel like it covers everything for most of mine.

numpy-thagoras2• 11 months ago

Would you be open to sharing this here?

skybrian2• 11 months ago

Except not hidden. Why do people want to hide important files and directories? Particularly documentation? Tradition, I guess, but it's an antipattern that makes everything more opaque.

Maybe robot_docs?

animal_spirits• 11 months ago

It's so it doesn't clash with any project that actually has a functional `agents/` directory

nephanth3• 11 months ago

It is files that are meant to be read by software, not humans. From my point of view this seems like a prime candidate for a hidden directory?

jppittma• 11 months ago

Because you're not an (llm) agent and they're not for your consumption? You probably don't need the context in those docs.

HumanOstrich3• 11 months ago

Where are they hidden that you are having trouble with? I've had an alias for `ls` that always includes dotfiles and `shopt -s dotglob` in my bash profile for decades. Mac Finder is a little more obnoxious with having to do `Meta+Shift+.` to reveal dotfiles.

Other than that, modern tooling like Git and IDEs do not "hide" dotfiles.

These days, a `.` in front of a file or folder in a repo is more to indicate it is metadata/config. Although I am in favor of putting all that stuff under `.config/`.

Maybe robot_docs?

No thanks.

meander_water2• 11 months ago

There shouldn't be anything stopping you from doing that.

You can just use the AGENTS.md file as an index pointing to other doc files.

This example does that -

https://github.com/apache/airflow/blob/main/AGENTS.md

setopt• 11 months ago

The point is that .agents is a hidden file while AGENTS.md is in your face like a README intended for humans.

Having an in-your-face file that links to a hidden file serves no purpose.

createaccount99• 11 months ago

Anti-feature if you ask me. An agent should be able to pick the stuff it needs from the AGENTS.md, and not blindly use everything.

barrkel• 11 months ago

Everything the agent has to read to pick out stuff costs $.

theshrike793• 11 months ago

Context is not infinite. Saving context for what matters is key in working with LLMs.

awbraunstein• 11 months ago

You can have multiple AGENTS.md files in your codebase and tooling will look at both the one in the current directory as well as in the root of the codebase. This way you can sort of do what you're suggesting but simultaneously keep the information closer to the code that it is describing.

bryanrasmussen• 11 months ago

so you would have an Agents.md in your testing folder and it would describe how to run the tests or generate new tests for the project - am I understanding the usage correctly?

thayne• 11 months ago

Kind of, but for any given directory you can't separate out instructions for building from instructions for naming conventions, for example.

lelele• 11 months ago

Could you please provide an example `index.md`? Thanks.

nivertech2• 11 months ago

This looks like a general software design / coding style docs both for humans and robots alike. I put these .md files into the docs/ folder. And they're written by the Claude Code itself.

AGENTS.md (and friends like CLAUDE.md) should be for robots only, whether a large single file with h2 headers (##) sections, or a directory with separate sections, is a matter of taste. Some software arch/design doc formats support both versions, i.e. see Arc42.

Though, it's much easier and less error-prone to @-mention a separate .md file, rather than a section in a large markdown file.

Smaller files also might be better when you want to focus a coding agent's attention on a specifric thing.

They're also easier to review diffs / PRs.

whywhywhywhy2• 11 months ago

whether a large single file with h2 headers (##) sections, or a directory with separate sections, is a matter of taste

Not sure it is when you consider how agents deal with large files, hows it gonna follow coding conventions if it doesn’t even grep them or just read the first few lines

irthomasthomas• 11 months ago

This is what I do. Everywhere my agent works it uses a .agent dir to store its logs and intermediary files. This way the main directories aren't polluted with cruft all the time.

xmorse• 11 months ago

You can put your docs in folders and reference them in AGENTS.md

Or use urls in your main AGENTS like I do for https://gitchamber.com

zimbatm• 11 months ago

This should have been CONTRIBUTING.md all along.

The content of the AGENTS.md is the same as what humans are looking for when contributing to a project.

oehpr2• 11 months ago

The most effective argument I have for getting other developers to comment their code is "The agent will read it and it will give better suggestions".

Truly perverse, but it works.

I agree with you... but the reality is that there's a wide contingent of people that are not capable of understanding "people don't know the same things as me". So they need some other reason.

alostpuppy• 11 months ago

Dude, this is such a good point.

layer8• 11 months ago

Arguably, contributors are human agents. ;)

hombre_fatal• 11 months ago

Nah, My standard for what I write for humans is 100x than the slop I spew for robots.

Also, you don’t even address their point.

sbochins2• 11 months ago

I don’t think they serve the same purpose. Most of the instructions I have for an agent won’t apply to a human. It’s mostly around the the requirements to bootstrap the project vs what I’d ask for a human to accept their pull request.

j2kun• 11 months ago

Yeah I can't find any example in an AGENTS.md that isn't useful information for a human. "Cluttering" a README.md is a silly justification.

heyzk• 11 months ago

I think semantically this is true, but the way humans and agents handle context, at the moment, is different enough to warrant a separate structure.

Western0• 11 months ago

bot.md not index.md

verdverm3• 11 months ago

This is one of the reasons I'm sticking with .github/... copilot instructions for now. We'll see if this proposal evolves over time as more voices enter the conversation

spullara• 11 months ago

just use a good agent like augmentcode that can look at relevant context across your repository and then you can name it whatever you want.

prmph• 11 months ago

The agents instructions file needs to be hierarchical; It's a pain managing multiple agents.md files with a lot of duplication between them for different projects, even in a mono-repo. we probably need a tool for this.

In any case, I increasingly question the use of an agents file. What's the point, then the agent forget about them every few prompt, and need to be constantly reminded to go through the file again and again?

Another thought: are folks committing their AGENTS.md? If so, do you feel comfortable with the world knowing that a project was built with the help of AI? If not, how do you durably persist the file?

tomComb4• 11 months ago

Agree on the need for hierarchical agents.md. I thought that was kind of standard and I am surprised that this proposal doesn’t support that.

petesergeant2• 11 months ago

do you feel comfortable with the world knowing that a project was built with the help of AI?

I would be deal-breakingly concerned if I thought someone was actively trying to hide the fact from me.

faangguyindia2• 11 months ago

I am developing a coding agent that currently manages and indexes over 5,000 repositories. The agent's state is stored locally in a hidden `.agent` directory, which contains a configuration folder for different agent roles and their specific instructions. Then we've a "agents" folder with multiple files, each file has

Agent only reads the file if its role is defined there.

Inside project directory, we've a dot<coding agent name> folder where coding agents state is stored.

Our process kicks off with an `/init` command, which triggers a deep analysis of an entire repository. Instead of just indexing the raw code, the agent generates a high-level summary of its architecture and logic. These summaries appear in the editor as toggleable "ghost comments." They're a metadata layer, not part of the source code, so they are never committed in actual code. A sophisticated mapping system precisely links each summary annotation to the relevant lines of code.

This architecture is the solution to a problem we faced early on: running Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) directly on source code never gave us the results we needed.

Our current system uses a hybrid search model. We use the AST for fast, literal lexical searches, while RAG is reserved for performing semantic searches on our high-level summaries. This makes all the difference. If you ask, "How does authentication work in this app?", a purely lexical search might only find functions containing the word `login` and functions/classes appearing in its call hierarchy. Our semantic search, however, queries the narrative-like summaries. It understands the entire authentication flow like it's reading a story, piecing together the plot points from different files to give you a complete picture.

It works like magic.

jzig• 11 months ago

Tell me more!

faangguyindia2• 11 months ago

The agent I’m developing is designed to improve or expand upon "old codebases." While many agents can generate code from scratch, the real challenge lies in enhancing legacy code without breaking anything.

This is the problem I’m tackling, and so far, the approach has been effective. It's simple enough for anyone to use: the agent makes a commit, and you can either undo, squash, or amend it through the Git UI.

The issue is that developers often skip reviewing the code properly. To counter that, I’m considering shifting to a hunk-by-hunk review process, where each change is reviewed individually. Once the review is complete, the agent would commit the code.

The concept is simple, but the fun lies in the implementation details—like integrating existing CLI tools without giving the agent full shell access, unlike other agents.

What excites me most is the idea of letting 2–3 agents compete, collaborate, and interpret outputs to solve problems and "fight" to find the best solution.

That’s where the real fun is.

Think of it as surgeons scalpel approach rather than "steam roller" approach most agents take.

simianwords• 11 months ago

To add further to your idea:

You can create a hierarchy of summaries. The idea being summaries can exist at the method level, class level and the microservice or module level. Each layer of summary points to its child layers and leaf nodes are code themselves. I think it can be a B tree or a normal tree.

The RAG agent can traverse as deep as needed for the particular semantic query. Each level maintains semantic understanding of the layer beneath it but as a tradeoff it loses a lot of information and keeps only what is necessary.

This will work if the abstractions in the codebase are done nicely - abstractions are only useful if they actually hide implementation details. If your abstractions are good enough, you can afford to keep only the higher layers (as required) in your model context. But if it’s not good, you might even have to put actual code in it.

For instance a method like add(n1, n2) is a strong abstraction - I don’t need to know its implementation but only semantic meaning at this level.

But in real life methods don’t always do one thing - there’s logging, global caches etc.

threecheese• 11 months ago

Working on something similar. Legacy codebase understanding requires this type of annotation, and “just use code comments” is too much of a blunt instrument to too much good. Are you storing the annotations completely out of band wrt the files, or using filesystem capabilities like metadata?

This type of metadata itself could have individual value; there are many types of documents that will be analyzed by LLMs, and will need not only a place to store analysis alongside document-parts, but meta-metadata related to the analysis (like timestamps, models, prompts used etc). Of course this could all be done OOB, but then you need a robust way to link your metadata store to a file that has a lifecycle all its own thats only observable by you (probably).

lerp-io• 11 months ago

cant you simply prompt it to read the code and create whatever md you need it to lol what is the point of this

legostormtroopr• 11 months ago

So the solution to using AI so you don't have to code, is to try to write some kind of pseudocode in AGENT.md and hope the AI does a bit better?

Why does it seem that the solution to no-code (which AI-coding agents are) always comes back to "no-code, but actually there is some code behind the scenes, but if you squint enough it looks like no-code".

ecb_penguin3• 11 months ago

So the solution to using AI so you don't have to code, is to try to write some kind of pseudocode in AGENT.md and hope the AI does a bit better?

Umm, no. Where did you get that idea?

The purpose of the agent.md file is to give it instructions. Nothing about no-code AI said there would be no instructions...

pmg101• 11 months ago

I'm old enough to remember when computer code was called "instructions".

Eg, the 6502 instruction set. https://www.masswerk.at/6502/6502_instruction_set.html

History doesn't repeat but it rhymes!

meowface2• 11 months ago

Unfortunate that two of the most-used tools (Claude Code, Gemini CLI) don't support it.

neutronicus• 11 months ago

What does "support" for this format mean beyond "reading the file without explicit prompting"?

Like, as the end-user, if I copy-paste "Please see AGENTS.md in the project root for some information on the project" have I filled the gap?

Or is the LLM ingesting this file in some special way I'm losing out on?

meowface2• 11 months ago

Like, as the end-user, if I copy-paste "Please see AGENTS.md in the project root for some information on the project" have I filled the gap?

Probably, yeah. It would cause an extra tool call at the start of every session, though, so a symlink might be preferable.

cortesi• 11 months ago

I have a tiny, relevant weekend project:

https://github.com/cortesi/agentsmd

This is a command-line tool that lets you generate your AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files from common sources. So, for instance, if you have Rust-specific guidance for models, you can define it once, and then automatically include it in any project that contains Rust based on the `lang()` language matcher.

This is one of those small tools I now use many times a day to maintain and update ubiquitous agents files. Maybe other folks will find it useful too.

rblatz• 11 months ago

We are going the opposite way, putting instructions in md files and putting instructions in the Claude.md file when it should read those instructions.

indigodaddy• 11 months ago

opencode made one of these for me when I did an /init in my existing project

aeon_ai• 11 months ago

I am not anti-AI - perhaps obviously.

But this is wildly insufficient as a standard, and wholly lacks innovation on the dimension of 'context management' as a discipline.

alfg• 11 months ago

I'm sure there's plenty of overlap with just using a CONTRIBUTING.md or even the README.md development setup. Especially since LLMs should understand guidance in human instructions.

ec109685• 11 months ago

Do all ai agents only include a single AGENTS.md, closest in the hierarchy? Where do people put common instructions or do they just copy and paste?

jpalomaki• 11 months ago

The agents are really flexible. You can just tell them read whatever file/folder.

albert_e• 11 months ago

README.md should have been called HUMANS.md in retrospect

nunez• 11 months ago

Did they just reinvent the Makefile?

koakuma-chan• 11 months ago

Make is a command runner, no? It's completely different.

ekusiadadus4• 11 months ago

Markdown is certainly easy for humans to write, but as OpenAI pointed out last week, wouldn’t an XML-based format be easier for LLMs to parse and understand?

Osyris• 11 months ago

but as OpenAI pointed out last week

What are you referring to here?

ekusiadadus4• 11 months ago

https://cdn.openai.com/API/docs/gpt-5-for-coding-cheatsheet....

From OpeAI's last week document for coding with gpt5.

#3. Use XML-like syntax to help structure instructions

mongol• 11 months ago

LLMs should make it easier for us, not the opposite

thrown-08258• 11 months ago

they are just moving goal posts because agents still largely suck for everything except a couple of super saturated problem domains that really shouldn’t require anything special from a dev anyways

ekusiadadus4• 11 months ago

How are you actually running this in practice with Claude Code? Do you just tell Claude to always read and follow AGENTS.md, or do you also use an MCP server to strictly control which commands (like pnpm test or pnpm lint) it can run? I’d love to hear what workflows or best practices have worked well for you in day-to-day use.

j452• 11 months ago

I have Claude Code maintain the files and reference links between them.

ekusiadadus4• 11 months ago

Isn't it consuming more tokens ?

EarlKing• 11 months ago

I have a much shorter AGENTS.md:

"No."

masters3d• 11 months ago

AGENTS.md fine but I hope the pattern sticks around. Another way is to use the README.md with different sections for humans or agents. As agent content windows expand to being able to load all the context in a repo, it will not matter much.

tediousgraffit1• 11 months ago

lol, if the primary outcome is better documentation...i'll take it

JaiRathore• 11 months ago

what about for plan.md, does everyone just trash the plan once the development is done ? Sometimes the final generated plans (created after iterating with the model on it) are as good as design documents and can be useful for future enhancements, so trashing them doesn't feel right, whereas checking them in seems like too many non code related files in every directory

stellalo• 11 months ago

So this is a filename, not really a format?

throwawaybob420• 11 months ago

Honestly, this is some of the most bizarre shit I’ve ever seen.

The day AI and AI adjacent slop is no longer polluting the front page is the day when some other random fad takes hold I guess.

bhaney• 11 months ago

These AI-oriented examples look more useful to me than most human-oriented READMEs I've seen.

porker• 11 months ago

Yes, writing clear examples and instructions for humans was never seen as a good use of time, but as soon as a dumb mutt of an AI needs them to do stuff, they're written, and with more compassion than was ever shown to newbies asking questions...

We've lost a bunch of contributions to open source projects because these guides weren't there to help new people contribute.

surrTurr• 11 months ago

pretty useless for big projects if it doesn't support modular instruction files (with apply regexes)

baalimago• 11 months ago

The ironic thing about this is that it's equally valuable for anyone contributing the project. But for some reason it's only prioritized to make LLMs follow styleguide, humans need not apply (?)

masci• 11 months ago

If agents are so smart why not using what already exists for guiding humans, like README.md or literally any md/rst resource they can find in the repo? This is so stupid, and we're allowing it to happen.

Sammi• 11 months ago

Honestly the stuff in my llm instructions file is basically just a readme that is just as good for human consumption. Why aren't we just calling it a readme then?

thrown-08258• 11 months ago

we allowed the js ecosystem to happen

brainlessdev4• 11 months ago

Strange website. It is made by OpenAI. I suppose they are doing this to gain visits and as marketing positioning?

There is no format here, just a filename.

Also, Anthropic/Claude is a glaring omission. I suppose people can use symbolic links if they want to and point CLAUDE.md at AGENTS.md.

kristopolous2• 11 months ago

it's actually by sourcegraph and it's been up since may.

Here's where it used to go: https://web.archive.org/web/20250702163859/ampcode.com/agent...

Here's their announcement

https://ampcode.com/news/AGENT.md

The openai thing is some recent partnership I'm guessing

Interesting enough, Sourcegraph had agent.md which now 301's to agents.md (with the s).

brainlessdev4• 11 months ago

Interestingly, the old one mentioned CLAUDE.md and ln -s, but the new one does not. The whole website is just a marketing/partnerships battle, it seems.

Destiner• 11 months ago

Claude is omitted, because Claude is the only agent that still doesn't support the standard filename convention.

brainlessdev4• 11 months ago

The website could mention that. Since I did not discover this website's affiliation with OpenAI until I found the GitHub repo, I had assumed that this is purely an informative website, and as such I expected it to mention the agent tool most people I know use (Claude). Even if that mention is "Claude does not support this yet".

anonyfox• 11 months ago

Currently I am building a new JS web toolkit on the side with AI assistance for faster progress, and I came to have some prompts folder in the project root that I just drop into the agents (like cursor CMD+I) and point it to a direction (file/folder).

https://github.com/Anonyfox/raven-js/tree/main/prompts

I think we should not split README and AGENT into different documents - the way its heading is that the coding agents are optimized to "act as" humans and use tools like them more and more - and understanding how something works or how to do something should be aimed for humans and expecting AI tools to pick it up like a human would... if they don't currently then probably they will in the the future.

thrown-08258• 11 months ago

Agreed, between this and MCP we are quickly approaching the point where you basically need to document your codebase twice.

Its completely pointless

tracker13• 11 months ago

Kind of my first thought... seems to me this could be part of README.md, or as another suggested CONTRIBUTING.md

I tend to put a lot of this type of info into the readme anyway... for more complex projects, I'll include a docs/ directory with more markdown, images as needed, etc.

For that matter, I think context hints from the likes of Dockerfile(s), compose, and .github/workflows also can serve a dual-purpose here.

thrown-08258• 11 months ago

Including artifacts like this which are intended only to be consumed by ai defeats the entire point.

tomashubelbauer• 11 months ago

Agent-specific guidance like this rubs me the wrong way as well. The SoTA coding agents shouldn't need this much babysitting IMO. There are valid things that are not code that should be a part of the repository, like code formatting preferences (but ideally as linter rules the agent can just run, not prose), information about structuring of the code base (but as CONTRIBUTING.md or something else human-centric which the agent should pick up), documentation (either as source or as a link, again, not agent-centric) etc. I might be blanking on something that is truly agent-only and doesn't fit in a human-centric document or location better, but even if I am, that should be a minimal amount of instructions compared to what should go into the human-centric prose in the code base and be more widely valuable than just for the agent.

mustaphah• 11 months ago

Fair point, but if it's minimal and useful for agents, I'm okay with it.

Humans and AIs have different weak spots: we can infer intent from convention, but an AI often struggles unless you spell it out. Ignoring that gap just to keep things "purely human" feels counterproductive. Agents deserve some sympathy.

fallpeak3• 11 months ago

In my opinion an AGENTS.md file isn't an artifact at all (in the sense of being a checked-in part of the codebase), it's part of the prompt. You should gitignore them and use them to give the LLM a brief overview of the things that matter to your work and the requests you are making.

thrown-08258• 11 months ago

every example in the wild has these checked in and treated like a lock file where everyone is scared to touch it and introduce weird behavior.

personally i think this pattern is a dead end and trying to build deterministic agentic behavior on top of inherently non-deterministic systems is a fools errand.

zulban2• 11 months ago

The entire point of AGI maybe. But until we get that, if it's useful then people can do it.

tappio• 11 months ago

I've came across llms.txt files in few services. I don't know how the agents.md compares to the llms.txt files, but I guess they could pretty much have the same content. See more also here https://llmstxt.org/

Anyhow, I have made few interesting observations, that might be true for the agents.md also:

Agents have trouble with these large documents, and they seem to miss many relevant nuances. However, its rather easy to point them to the right direction when all relevant information is in one file.

Another thing is that I personally prefer this style of documentation. I can just ctrl+f and find relevant information, rather than using some built in search and trying to read through documents. I feel that the UX of one large .txt file is better than the documentation scattered between multiple pages using some pretty documentation engine.

donperignon2• 11 months ago

If the context is not good for a Llm is also not good for a human. All this magical nonsense that is blooming around AI is tiresome, it needs to stop. Programming is not tarot reading or a slot machine. We cannot leave the security and robustness of our systems into such heuristics.

iammrpayments• 11 months ago

I can’ take this seriously, ever since they started talking about llms.txt, thousands of apps spawned promising increasing AI SEO by generating such file. I’ve created one myself for several websites and have seen 0 impact. I guess agents.md will have the same fate.

pietz2• 11 months ago

This isn't a format. It's just a convention that literally boils down to: Put LLM instructions in a text file and call it AGENTS.md.

Well, thanks I guess?

meindnoch2• 11 months ago

But it's open! That's the most important part I think. If it wasn't open, you would have to pay a license fee for the owner of the AGENTS.md format. But since it is open, you can simply create a file named "AGENTS.md" without paying anyone!

pietz2• 11 months ago

Holy sh*t, I accidentally for got the "S" and was directly forwarded to PayPal.

genesem• 11 months ago

Why this even required..

cube00• 11 months ago

It makes people feel like they're in control of the text prediction agent when actually it'll only follow this some of the time.

1. I tell Copilot until I'm blue in the face that the project must build.

2. Copilot assures me it has fixed the build errors it created.

3. Still get build errors

4. Run out of tokens so I come back next month and repeat.

modernerd• 11 months ago

Why not use contributing.md?

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/setting-up-your-proje...

The agents.md minisite implies agents.md files should be useful for humans and robots alike:

Commit messages or pull request guidelines, security gotchas, large datasets, deployment steps: anything you’d tell a new teammate belongs [in agents.md] too.

Agents are just another type of contributor. Maybe agents.md is just what we need to finally trick devs into writing concise docs.

whirlwin• 11 months ago

Pro-tip: For GitHub Copilot which doesn't yet support AGENTS.md, you can create a symlink if your GH Copilot instruction files are defined on a per-repo basis:

ln -s AGENTS.md .github/copilot-instructions.md

donperignon2• 11 months ago

Pretty advance stuff. Vibing is definitely a difficult skill to learn.

kissgyorgy2• 11 months ago

I was thinking about this too, but the problem is that different models need to be prompted differently for better performance.

Claude is the best model for tool calling, you might need to prompt less reliable models differently. Prompt engineering is really hard, a single context for all models will never be the best IMO.

This is why Claude Code is so much better than any other agentic coding tool, because they know the model very well and there is an insane amount of prompt engineering went into it.

I tried GPT-5 with OpenCode thinking that it will be just as good, but it was terrible.

Model-specific prompt engineering makes a huge difference!

smnscu• 11 months ago

I've been calling this context.md in my projects (alongside a progress.md for TODOs and breaking down complex tasks). I don't care what we call it as long as we settle on a convention.

torginus• 11 months ago

I feel like humans are slowly being tricked into maintaining proper documentation for their projects.

falcor84• 11 months ago

"Mission. Fucking. Accomplished."

https://xkcd.com/810/

driverdan• 11 months ago

Joking aside this is kind of how I'm pitching it to our team. Even if LLMs don't significantly improve productivity writing code they will at least get us to document everything in a similar amount of time.

jcutrell• 11 months ago

Aside from it being "instructions for agents", I'm not sure I understand how this isn't just a markdown file that more or less reads like a readme that targets more junior engineers.

kordlessagain2• 11 months ago

No, you nailed it. The rest is theater.

CMay• 11 months ago

Prediction: this means extra work for developers. it also means extra potential abuse and risk through agents. the agents.md will sometimes be outdated or inconsistent with the readme. even the readmes are sometimes outdated or inconsistent with the code. some developers will interpret agents.md as compiling code for the agents to use, not for the user's to use, so maybe you're not even compiling the same code the same way a human should and expectations are broken. it's only a contextual efficiency if it's reliable too, because errors can mean having to use even more context accounting for it.

better idea since agents will already be cursed to do these things:

- any decent readme should have titled sections unless it's small

- if it's small, just feed the entire readme into it

- if it's large, provide it with a list of readme sections and let it choose which ones are relevant.

- also highlight which parts of the markdown include code blocks.

- if all else fails and it's huge without sections, just use RAG.

- if your model runs fast enough, then even if it's huge, just feed the whole thing in so you avoid the risks of RAG. setting up new software can be important enough that you may as well get it right.

people couldn't be hassled to make things accessible to the blind or visually impaired really, why suddenly should they be all excited to make everything accessible to AI? besides, agents.md comes with psychological baggage like, "i'm presuming my project is interesting enough to be used by agents!". just use the readme. it's basically always there and then in most cases you won't have to do 2 requests, you can just do 1.

if "agents.md" is supposed to be anything, it should be a locked file or special URL generated by github for your repo that always mirrors the relevant instructions in the readme so there's some higher reliability. then anyone that specifically wants to improve agents.md can simply follow some conventions in the readme file to make sure understanding is maximized. essentially, a github agent generates agents.md for other agents. if the github agent can't understand the readme well enough to produce an agents.md, what chance would your agent have? if the github agent feels like there are contradictions or confusion, it can automatically report that to the developers so they can sort it out.

besides, github themselves could have motivation to do this if they are destined to be slammed with tons of bot traffic they have no way to sufficiently block. at least this way maybe they can make it more efficient and it becomes another valuable feature of the platform.

jerpint• 11 months ago

I like the concept and have built my own context management tool for this very purpose!

https://github.com/jerpint/context-llemur

Though instead of being a single file, you and LLMs cater your context to be easily searchable (folders and files). It’s all version controlled too so you can easily update context as projects evolves.

I made a video showing how easy it is to pull in context to whatever IDE/desktop app/CLI tool you use https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DgqlUpnC3uw

varispeed• 11 months ago

When did this happen - first corporates where wary of using AI generated code due to copyright concerns and now we have full embrace?

I guess we are not yet in the phase where everyone will be scrambling to find competent engineers to clean-up the AI mess in their codebases?

bgwalter• 11 months ago

It is only the "AI" companies that force their employees to babysit LLMs, so very few real projects do this in the wild.

pmarreck• 11 months ago

I `ln -s` mine to CLAUDE.md for convenience

abhisek• 11 months ago

Good idea. Just the other day I was thinking of writing a templatized generator for coding agent instructions for various agents like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and others that use their own unique file convention.

super256• 11 months ago

This looks like a normal README.md to me. Why do we need a separate file?

__alias3• 11 months ago

It's really supposed to supplement README.md, but targeting an agentic coding loop.

E.g. "Before each commit, do X and Y to validate the changes."

AbuAssar• 11 months ago

I didn't know .md TLD is available!

qwertox2• 11 months ago

I haven't really done anything serious with Claude Code, but today I tested starting claude in ~/claude/test, and told it to list my home dir, which it then did.

Is there a way to tell tools like Claude Code that it must never leave ~/claude/test, and don't event think about using absolute paths, or relative paths which contain `..`?

bavell• 11 months ago

Chroot jail?

anuramat2• 11 months ago

it's already read only outside of project directories (except for Bash tool); your only further option is to wrap it in a sandbox, `bwrap` is perfect for this

"don't even think" is in the default system prompt, but it's inherently indeterministic and can be overridden with a direct instruction as you have seen

qwertox2• 11 months ago

Wow! Thank you for bringing bubblewrap to my attention. What an amazing tool! This opens so many doors.

thrown-08258• 11 months ago

run it in a vm, running an agent directly on your machine is madness

CompoundEyes• 11 months ago

I noticed the example of ln command symbolic linking of the files on the front page. I think it’s interesting how the cli aspect of agent coding and tooling is pushing command prompt / powershell users to become familiar with the *nix shells and commands. In the enterprise Microsoft Visual Studio IDE world some of its very alien. I regularly do tutorials for team members that just think of the cli as a place where they execute ps1s, haven’t used wsl2 or git bash profiles or have limited exposure by way of dealing with containers. Not a criticism.

i4k• 11 months ago

Hey guy looking at this thread from 2035, so you know... there are still plenty of folks in the industry that knows that this is dumb. We are just too tired of fighting nonsense... we just won the web3/blockchain craziness and now this.

anuramat2• 11 months ago

I wish claude-style imports ("general guidelines: @CONTRIBUTING.md") and bash execution ("available repositories: !`ghq list`") were a part of the spec

Even claude supports bash commands only in slash prompts; you could use a SessionStart though

witx3• 11 months ago

This is a sad timeline. "AI is going to replace engineers.. but first please fill this human-readable markdown file to help it understand your code". What a bunch of morons, that's just called documentation.

Instead of using AI where it can actually have positive impact on human lives like medicine, biology, et al. we're wasting huge amounts of resources and generating tons of pollution to teach it to program and steal art and books so Aunt Lily can generate a video of a dog.

zulban2• 11 months ago

that's just called documentation.

Ironically you sound very optimistic about AI capabilities here. This implies that an AI is just as capable as a human because all they need to contribute is what a human needs to contribute.

Alternatively if you think AI is useless trash then clearly they need more than a human readme to do anything?

witx3• 11 months ago

You're putting a whole lot of words in my mouth, I didn't say

stillsut• 11 months ago

I'm rolling my own like this [0]:

.agdocs/

├── specs/ # Task specification files

├── conf/ # Configuration files

├── guides/ # Development guides for agents

└── swap/ # Temporary files (gitignored)

Every markdown file in guides/ gets copied to any agent (aider, claude, gemini) I kick-off.

I gitignore this .agdocs directory by default. I find this useful because otherwise you get into _please commit or stash your changes_ when trying to switch branches.

But I also run an rsync script before each release to copy the .agdocs to a git tracked mirrored directory [1].

[0] https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/README.md#layout

[1] https://github.com/sutt/vidstr/tree/master/.public-agdocs/gu...

adidoit• 11 months ago

Fundamentally, AI still remains completions.

Agents, tools etc. all cover up the fact that it's completions

Still a remarkable, extraordinary technology. But the nomenclature distracts from how it works.

AGENTS.md is a great way to give context to get better completions.

jcmontx• 11 months ago

"Computing is just 1s, 0s and logic gates"

level09• 11 months ago

wrote this protocol like a month ago :)

https://github.com/level09/air

mmaunder• 11 months ago

Not having support for importing files makes this dead on arrival. It means you can’t have a local file with local environment details.

There’s an issue open about this in the repo already. I mean if you’re going to copy the CLAUDE.md concept, don’t leave out one of the most useful parts.

__alias3• 11 months ago

it does though, the same way that an llm can trace imports / dependencies through any coding language.

``` If adding tests, read @./TESTING_INSTRUCTIONS.md

```

lenerdenator2• 11 months ago

Dumb question from a guy who just set up Claude Code for the first time yesterday: would this be the equivalent of `CLAUDE.md` in a project directory?

steveklabnik2• 11 months ago

Yes.

phplovesong• 11 months ago

This makes me hate AI even more

laweijfmvo• 11 months ago

  > build steps, tests, and conventions that might clutter a README or aren’t relevant to human contributors.

what in fresh hell is the world coming to

kordlessagain2• 11 months ago

Basically a link to a page that says "create a file called AGENTS.md and put magic in it" and then links to a repo for the actual website saying this.

astrobe_• 11 months ago

You didn't get the memo? Vibe coding, obviously. Joke aside, I remember there was an article here a few weeks ago maybe about writing docs for bots about which commenters here said it was no different that writing better docs.

witx3• 11 months ago

Devs are just being trolled into documenting their code. But because it's AI they are hyping it

perrygeo• 11 months ago

Shouldn't you already have these instructions written out? Seems like AI has just motivated developers to finally write documentation.

dizlexic• 11 months ago

oh good, another one.

sbochins2• 11 months ago

I like this. I was using README.md, like many folks, which wasn’t bad. The main issue is the agent is typically updating it as well while building out the prototype.

eric-p7• 11 months ago

We can't call it robots.txt?

yoz-y• 11 months ago

What exactly here is an “open format”?

This is just a text file containing stuff. As many have said we have README, CONTRIBUTING…

Unless every tool is actually going to use it, this is yet another standard piled up.

smsm42• 11 months ago

Next thing they'd invent a special syntax to put explanations for agents in the code, which is exactly the same as comments, but with attached AI hype so maybe people would actually do it.

proflead• 11 months ago

Looks very promising. If you need to know a bit more about it, watch this video https://youtu.be/TC7dK0gwgg0?si=Eb5TK0gPvgahVbWQ

AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

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