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AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents

agents.md

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361–370 of 398 posts

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

#361

Post by heyzk »

zimbatm wrote: post #289
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…

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.

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.

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

#362

Post by Gracana »

fragmede wrote: post #350
Timwi wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really more the fault of the tab completion. There's no reason why it couldn't complete `prog` to `Programs`. It's just Unix tradition that they don't. I would prefer if they did.

In ~/.inputrc, add set completion-ignore-case on to enable case insensitive tab completion in bash.

Great tip! Apparently that's readline's config file, so this will affect a lot of things. That's great news for me; after switching to zsh I got used to case-insensitive tab completion, and now it annoys me when other tools don't work that way. This should help a lot.

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

#363

Post by nephanth »

skybrian wrote: post #357
nephanth wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why not both? Sure, it was written for the LLM, but since it’s in English and meant as a concise summary, you will learn things by reading it.

If that is the case then why call it Agents.md instead of integrating it with already existing documentation files or calling it something like "Summary.md"?

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

#364

Post by nephanth »

fleebee wrote: post #234
nephanth wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course but configuration for software is exactly what hidden files are usually used for

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

#366

Post by thrown-0825 »

qwertox wrote: post #274

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 `..`?

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

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

#367

Post by vFunct »

bix6 wrote: post #316
lemming wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are incorrect as they do not have a remote human operator Yes, they do, the term to search is “remote assistance operator”. e.g. https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/all-robotaxis-have-remote...

That’s phone a friend not someone remotely driving the car

They literally drive the car.

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

#368

Post by meindnoch »

pietz wrote: post #276
meindnoch wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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

Yes, most file managers require a payment when creating a file with a non-open name.

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

#369

Post by thrown-0825 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #95
sergiotapia wrote: post #8

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

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 intran…

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

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

#370

Post by oblio »

jadamson wrote: post #340
oblio wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The abbreviations I wrote are unambiguous. When I first learned about Unix, I basically guessed - I assume as most first timers do - that the folder is basically the location of miscellaneous files ("et caetera"). Oh, let alone the fact that a bunch of the abbreviations are utterly non-intuitive to first timers. /bin - binaries - nobody born after circa 1980 calls them that anymore. Executables, applications, apps, e…

> The abbreviations I wrote are unambiguous. When I first learned about Unix, I basically guessed They're completely ambiguous to someone who doesn't speak English. > /mnt - the whole metaphor of "mounting" is... debatable What? Have you never heard of mounting a picture on a wall? Mounting an engine? That's the metaphor. > Anyway, a lot of people have done this criticism better than me and it's boring at this point.…

> They're completely ambiguous to someone who doesn't speak English.

The baseline is English and that's life. I'm not a native English speaker.

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