AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md is “a simple, open format for guiding coding agents” — a markdown file in a repo holding “the extra, sometimes detailed context coding agents need: build steps, tests, and conventions,” keeping READMEs human-focused. It’s the context-standard counterpart to the capability-standard agentskills-spec: where skills package what an agent can do, AGENTS.md packages what it needs to know about this project. Source: agents.md.
Why it matters here
- Cross-tool convergence (the real signal): “over 60k open-source projects,” read by *OpenAI Codex, Google Jules, Aider, goose, VS Code, Devin, GitHub Copilot, JetBrains Junie, Cursor, Zed, Warp” and ~20 more — now stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation). This is the same open-standard-as-industry-attractor pattern the synthesis tracks for agentskills-spec, but for project context rather than capability.
- It’s the generalized, vendor-neutral sibling of tool-specific memory files (e.g.
CLAUDE.md), and the reviewable-context substrate that spec-driven-development and agent-guardrails (theAGENTS.mdcontract in agents-never-do-alone) build on.
Related
agentskills-spec · agent-skills · spec-driven-development · agent-guardrails · agents-never-do-alone · claude-agent-sdk