Hacker News Reader

Comment by blinkymach12 | Hacker News Reader

I had the same thought as I read this example. Everything in the AGENTS.md file should just be in a good README.md file.

View on HN

My READMEs don't have things like "don't run the whole test suite unless I instruct you to because it will take too long; run targeted tests instead".

Why not? "For most development we recommend running single/specific tests since the whole suite is slow/expensive." sounds like a great thing to put in the readme.

That seems exactly like something you would want to tell another developer

You're going to include specific coding style rules in your README? Or other really agent-specific things like guidance about spawning sub-agents?

They are separate for a good reason. My CLAUDE.md and README.md look very different.

Why would you publish agent specific things to your codebase? That's personal preference and doesn't have anything to do with the project.

To share the most effective workflows so people don't have to muddle around figuring out what to do?

You're going to try to tell people how to code with agents in the readme? Why?

README often contains only basic context for the project and instructions for basic tasks like running it and building it from source. If additional information for developers, like coding conventions, is short enough compared to the rest of the README then it sometimes gets added there too, but if there's a lot of it then it's frequently kept elsewhere to prevent README from getting overwhelming for end users and random people just checking out the project.

I don't think anything requires a README.md to be monolithic. They often provide the introductory material that you mention here, then link out to other appropriate files for contribution guidelines, etc.

It should not contain personal preference. It should contain project conventions.

Project guidelines, how to build your project, where to find or implement different types of features, are not personal preference. If different members of your team disagree on these things, that is a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com