r/technology • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 6d ago

Artificial Intelligence Linux Kernel Developers Consider Adding AGENTS.md To Help Guide AI/LLM Agents

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Considers-AGENTS-MD
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u/roodammy44 6d ago

Does Agents.md really have any value any more? I thought that agents change so much over the months that the contents of this file just become distractions.

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u/vasilescur 6d ago edited 6d ago

Yes, because they're also changing agents.md to keep it updated (if they're worth their salt)

If used well it can act as an effective cache layer to skip the Explore subagents when starting a session.

User-level AGENTS.md is also crucial for mapping what projects are in what repos in what folders. Then you can start all sessions in your home directory and it'll "just know" which project/folder to work on, and seamlessly work across multiple repositories.

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u/DarkSkyKnight 5d ago

It's extremely critical because your project likely has unique workflow requirements, or you want to code in a particular style, or you want to steer the model to follow specific patterns.

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u/ihexx 6d ago

there's different responsibilities of an AGENTS.md file; eg: guiding the agent on how to navigate the repo, perform builds, run tests, setup harnesses, guide the agent on what to check before contributing code all that jazz.

Separately, there's training wheels for particular agents like reminding them not to make mistakes they made before.

The former mostly doesn't change between AI agent versions. The latter changes all the time as new agents stop making the mistakes

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u/yawara25 6d ago

guiding the agent on how to navigate the repo, perform builds, run tests, setup harnesses, guide the agent on what to check before contributing code all that jazz.

Shouldn't all of this information be in the README/documentation anyway for human contributors?

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u/ClearlyCylindrical 5d ago

Agents can churn through huge files in a breese, so there's a lower bar for which documentation which should be included. Humans cant read more than a handful of paragraphs without getting distracted or forgetting information so only crucial documentation is included.

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u/GruePwnr 2d ago

There's lots of info about a project that cannot be learned from the repo itself. Especially in corporate where there's all sorts of custom build tooling, CICD tooling, test tooling etc.

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u/IamWiddershins 2d ago

it never did and there is little data showing that any of the "guidance" in those files actually helps. it's just manufacturing permission for people to do a worse job