OSS Maintainers Can Inject Their Standards into Contributors' AI Tools

Wrote this after seeing the news about the matplotlib debacle. Figured a decent solution to AI submitted PR's was to prompt inject them with your project's standards.

----

AI-assisted PRs are landing in maintainers’ queues with the wrong CSS framework and no tests. Sometimes with no disclosure that AI generated the code at all. The contributor often isn’t cutting corners. Their AI tool just had no project context when it generated the code.

There are two files that fix this. CLAUDE.md is read automatically by Claude Code when a contributor opens the project. AGENTS.md is a vendor-neutral standard, already supported by over twenty tools, that does the same thing across all of them. Both work the same way: when a contributor clones your repo and opens it in their AI tool, these files are loaded into the tool’s context before a single line is generated.