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

tomashubelbauer 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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mustaphah 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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fallpeak 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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thrown-0825 6 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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fallpeak 6 days ago | parent [-]

I mean, by construction you're only ever going to see the examples where people checked them in and published that. It doesn't mean that other people aren't getting more use out of local instructions customized to their particular work.

	▲	thrown-0825 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		would be genuinely interested to see data on that, you are right that there is a selection bias for only seeing what I'm describing.

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zulban 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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