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
391–398 of 398 posts
Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
#392Unfortunate that two of the most-used tools (Claude Code, Gemini CLI) don't support it.
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?
>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.
Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be open to sharing this here?
Here you go: # ASCII RPG This repo uses Rust + Bevy (0.16.1), multi-crate workspace, RON assets, and a custom ASCII UI. The rules below keep contributions consistent, testable, and verifiable. ## Quick rules (read me first) - Read/update CURRENT_TASK.md each step; delete when done. - Build/lint/test (fish): cargo check --workspace; and cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings; and cargo test --workspace…
Thank you!
Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s phone a friend not someone remotely driving the car
That’s irrelevant though. If the system requires human intervention, then it’s not fully autonomous by definition. See https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-... for example: The companies do not advertise this feature out loud too much, but they do acknowledge it, and the reports are that it happens somewhere between every one to two miles traveled. That’s… not very autonomous.
It’s not irrelevant because those are fundamentally different modes of operating / troubleshooting. You say they have someone drive it. I say they don’t. We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems.
Furthermore 2 miles of autonomous driving is… autonomous. And over time that will become 3 then 4 then 5. Perhaps it never reaches infinite autonomy but an hour of autonomous driving is more than enough to get most people most places in a city and I’d bet you money that we’ll reach that point within a decade.
Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s irrelevant though. If the system requires human intervention, then it’s not fully autonomous by definition. See https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-... for example: The companies do not advertise this feature out loud too much, but they do acknowledge it, and the reports are that it happens somewhere between every one to two miles traveled. That’s… not very autonomous.
It’s not irrelevant because those are fundamentally different modes of operating / troubleshooting. You say they have someone drive it. I say they don’t. We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems. Furthermore 2 miles of autonomous driving is… autonomous. And over time that will become 3 then 4 then 5. Perhaps it never reaches infinite autonomy but an h…
You say they have someone drive it.
I didn't say that. But they're not fully autonomous.
We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems.
This whole subthread started with the assertion:
Just like we will never have fully self-driving cars...
So we did start out by discussing whether current Waymo is fully autonomous or not. It then devolved into nit-picking, but that was where the conversation started.
FWIW I agree that Waymo is an amazing achievement that will only get better. I don't know (or care, frankly) if they will ever be fully autonomous. If I could, I'd buy one of those cars right now, and pay a subscription to cover the cost of the need for someone to help the car out when it needs it. But it's incorrect to say that they don't need human operators, when they clearly currently do.
Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agents are capable of semantic search and reading an entire directory devoted to human readable docs. So I'm not sure this is a particularly good argument. Just make it clear where to find what.
Because managing an AI’s context is important and you don’t want to put stuff in there that’s not relevant. Just because they can read it and understand it doesn’t mean there are no better alternatives.
That's also not a strong argument?
Agents often have system prompts specific to their purpose. Having a single dump of agent instructions will increase noise in the context.
Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
#397I 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 folder…
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).
Re: AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
#398We'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…
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.
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