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Comment by eats_indigo | Hacker News Reader

In what way is this a format or standard? It's just markdown in a namespce

You could get this page down to under 100 words by simply having it say "the name of the file LLM agents will look at for instructions on the repo is AGENTS.md; that's it, that's the standard".

It's a real problem! Every agent right now has their own weird filename. I love David Crawshaw's sketch.dev, but for reasons passing understanding they choose "dear_llm.md" for theirs.

I created a ticket for adding AGENTS.md support.

edit: They're on it. Not everything has to be complex; sometimes somebody just has to do it.

Easy story points

Standards derive their value precisely from being simple and widely adopted - think of .gitignore, CONTRIBUTING.md, or LICENSE files that work because everyone agrees on their location and purpose.

.gitignore is not a standard: it’s a format used by one tool. A few other tools piggy-back on it (e.g. ripgrep ignores paths matching in .gitignore, .hgignore, &c. by default), not infrequently to confusion.

CONTRIBUTING.md is not a standard: it’s a convention pushed by one platform, used by some projects (but many more will not write down such information, or put it in a README file, or put it in some other documentation).

LICENSE is definitely not a standard: it’s one of a wide variety of names people use to hold licensing information, which some tools will be able to detect. I just looked through my /usr/share/licenses, of 1135 files, only 300 are named LICENSE—it’s the most popular single name, sure, with COPYING next at 182, but it’s still definitely a minority, though in certain ecosystems it may be more popular. Any license-detection tooling will be scanning for a lot more file names. “LICENSE” is a very weak convention, compared with the others.

All the different coding agents put their "rules" in different places: .cursor, CLAUDE.md etc..

It makes no sense and it really needs standardisation. I hope this catches on.

As a workaround you can add a wrapper launcher script that symlinks them and then removes the symlink after you exit

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