The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding coding agents

Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by echelon on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @10:31PM (#44958163)

This. Projects need to stop inventing their own root level files and directories.

Stop polluting the root dir.

I'm not a fan of the name "well-known", but at least it's a convention [1].

I think it'd be great if we took something like XDG [2] and made it common for repositories, build scripts, package managers, tooling configs, etc.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8615

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory

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Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by vinnymac on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @11:00PM (#44958275)

.config is a good name, and has a small following

https://dot-config.github.io

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Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by edoceo on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @12:06AM (#44958545)

And is also used in my $HOME directory - I like repeating good patterns, or at least well known patterns. (I still have ./etc and ./lib directories in my projects)

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Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by echelon on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @11:17PM (#44958341)

This has my vote. Thank you for sharing.

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Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by binarysneaker on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @12:24AM (#44958614)

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/927/

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Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by soraminazuki on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @08:11AM (#44961159)

Or just config with no dots.

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Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by oblio on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @02:33AM (#44959245)

I've been in IT for a long time and configured Apache, Nginx, even IIS a bit back in the day, but I actually didn't know about well-known.

I guess I was one of the lucky 10000 :-)

https://xkcd.com/1053/

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Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by riffic on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @05:19PM (#44966598)

in that case it's .not-so-well-known/

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Re:The AGENTS.md Standard: A simple, open format for guiding... by eadmund on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @06:40AM (#44960635)

I believe with direnv or a similar tool (e.g. Emacs’s directory-local feature) one can append $REPO/.config to XDG_CONFIG_HOME, $REPO/.local/bin to PATH and so on so that when in the context of a particular directory everything Just Works.

I think all this agentic stuff could live quite happily in $REPO/.config/agents/.

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