You’d put the things that aren’t up to personal preference in there, like an AI disclosure / contribution policy or what changes should look like to be reviewable. You usually don’t need to tell humans “don’t change things for the sake of changing them” because we don’t like to do more work than we have to, but agents do.
You can also include a compact “table of contents,” describing what lives where in the project. It saves at most a little bit of exploration though so I don’t know if it’s really worth the maintenance
Depends on the model, Gemma 4 is extremely lazy in my experience, half the time it won’t finish the task properly anyway. Deepseek (not sure of the version) was crazily overactive. I personally prefer Gemma’s laziness, because it avoid making the chaotic changes that need to be rolled back, but thats a personal preference.
And thats kinda why I don’t like it being committed. If the entire team is using one model, then sure, commit the agents.md, and everyone gets a sane default, but given this is a multi-developer project with likely many different agents and models in use, it makes more sense to me that each developer manages the agents.md themselves and optimises it for their own model/workflow.
You do definitely need some agent-specific guidance locally. The committed AGENTS.md should be pretty sparse. Ironically I think the clearest use case is for instructing agents that AI contributions are not allowed. Not that they won’t ignore it if prompted.
You’d put the things that aren’t up to personal preference in there, like an AI disclosure / contribution policy or what changes should look like to be reviewable. You usually don’t need to tell humans “don’t change things for the sake of changing them” because we don’t like to do more work than we have to, but agents do.
You can also include a compact “table of contents,” describing what lives where in the project. It saves at most a little bit of exploration though so I don’t know if it’s really worth the maintenance
Depends on the model, Gemma 4 is extremely lazy in my experience, half the time it won’t finish the task properly anyway. Deepseek (not sure of the version) was crazily overactive. I personally prefer Gemma’s laziness, because it avoid making the chaotic changes that need to be rolled back, but thats a personal preference.
And thats kinda why I don’t like it being committed. If the entire team is using one model, then sure, commit the agents.md, and everyone gets a sane default, but given this is a multi-developer project with likely many different agents and models in use, it makes more sense to me that each developer manages the agents.md themselves and optimises it for their own model/workflow.
You do definitely need some agent-specific guidance locally. The committed AGENTS.md should be pretty sparse. Ironically I think the clearest use case is for instructing agents that AI contributions are not allowed. Not that they won’t ignore it if prompted.