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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

#231

Post by PriNova »

nivertech wrote: post #228
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Claude Code globs and greps files, while Sourcegraph Amp uses RAG. But yes, naive coding agents will fill the context with the entire large file.

For the sake of clarity, Sourcegraph: Cody did RAG-style context fetching. However, Amp does not use RAG for context fetching.

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

#232

Post by fallpeak »

thrown-0825 wrote: post #203

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

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.

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

#234

Post by fleebee »

nephanth wrote: post #157
skybrian wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

It's configuration for software. If I want to be in control of and understand how my tools work I need to read (and write) those files.

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

#235

Post by modernerd »

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.

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

#237

Post by agos »

Philpax wrote: post #222
vFunct wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limited self-driving cars, with a remote human operator? no, I never have.

This rather underplays the experience of riding a Waymo. Where it works, it works: you get in and it takes you to the place, no human intervention required at any point. By analogy, the first hands-off coding agents may be like that: they may not work for everything, but where they do, they could work without human intervention.

"where it works, it works" by that metric we already have agents which don't need any guidance to program

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

#238

Post by donperignon »

whirlwin wrote: post #236

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

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

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

#239

Post by Philpax »

agos wrote: post #237
Philpax wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rather underplays the experience of riding a Waymo. Where it works, it works: you get in and it takes you to the place, no human intervention required at any point. By analogy, the first hands-off coding agents may be like that: they may not work for everything, but where they do, they could work without human intervention.

"where it works, it works" by that metric we already have agents which don't need any guidance to program

I'd say they're closer to 2010s self-driving cars; they still need frequent human intervention, even when on the happy path, to make sure they don't make a mess of things.

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

#240

Post by jadamson »

csvm wrote: post #186
wahern wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we're -> we are I've -> I have & -> and co. -> company won't -> will not it's -> it is

What is the point of this? What is this adding to the conversation?

What I took out of it is that we are human, and humans use abbreviations to save time and effort, not because printer ink was expensive in the '70s.
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