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AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

agents.md

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Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#191

Post by oblio »

von_lohengramm wrote: post #170
oblio wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or accept the fact that we're in 2025 and not follow Unix conventions from when paper and printer ink were expensive and they were printing out listings, and just name the thing "source". I've gotten used to it, obviously - as someone with a career in IT for 20 years - but /etc & co. annoy me to no end. I know it will never change, I know why it won't change, I know GoboLinux will be just an interesting experiment, b…

Have you considered that there are other metrics people are optimizing for nowadays? Perhaps typeability, screen real estate, familiarity/convention, etc.? Do you really want /User Files/Bob's Files/Coding Projects/Python Projects/Bob's Cool Python Library/Source Code/Model Files/SomeObject.py?

1. Yes, I have, if you re-read my comment.

2. I don't want to fight extreme positions which I did not make. Read this:

https://gobolinux.org/at_a_glance.html

I didn't say paths have to have spaces, etc. Just be reasonable and >.

Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#193

Post by kristopolous »

brainlessdev wrote: post #185

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.

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).

Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#194

Post by brainlessdev »

kristopolous wrote: post #193
brainlessdev wrote: post #185

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.

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).

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.

Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#195

Post by kristopolous »

brainlessdev wrote: post #194
kristopolous wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

now? maybe so. But when it was a sourcegraph only thing (really out of their amp project, which is like byterover/cline cloud/roocloud) not so much - they really don't expend much on marketing hype.

I mean I knew about it the day it launched but I'm /probably/ crazy.

Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#196

Post by taikahessu »

skhameneh wrote: post #138
CGamesPlay wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Negative assertions can lead to unwanted weights in the context. I've found positive assertions to be more predictable.

This. When doing Stable Diffusion, I have noticed this as well. Adding negatives can sometimes lead to the opposite results.

From what I can tell, if you say "no computers" for example (ie adding computer as negative), you are setting the scene for something like "where there should be computer, there is not".

I can't better describe this phenomenom, only that it can completely change the output in unexpected unwanted ways.

AB - B = AC

Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#197

Post by globular-toast »

oblio wrote: post #162
globular-toast wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason to use a src/ directory for the actual source code.

Or accept the fact that we're in 2025 and not follow Unix conventions from when paper and printer ink were expensive and they were printing out listings, and just name the thing "source". I've gotten used to it, obviously - as someone with a career in IT for 20 years - but /etc & co. annoy me to no end. I know it will never change, I know why it won't change, I know GoboLinux will be just an interesting experiment, b…

Call it whatever you like. I don't care and that clearly wasn't the point of my comment.

One thing I've learnt, though, is unless you have a very good reason to try to change language you should just talk the same language as everyone else. I don't like the American short billion. It makes no sense and it's less useful. But that's what I use because I speak English and that's what we use now. If I see a src/ directory I know exactly what it is. If I see source/ it will give me pause. Get over it IMO.

Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#198

Post by jillesvangurp »

blinkymach12 wrote: post #13

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 an…

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.

Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#199

Post by anonyfox »

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.

Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

#200

Post by lelele »

CharlesW wrote: post #36

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 ├── da…

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