This repository holds the educational material on AGENTS.md, the open format for giving coding agents project-specific guidance: a Markdown file you check into your repository, read today by twenty-plus agentic coding tools, and donated in December 2025 to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).
It is a resource repository, not a code repository. There is nothing to install and nothing to run.
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
carousel/ |
AAIF Project Focus - AGENTS.md, an 11-slide visual introduction to the format (PDF) |
carousel/AAIF Project Focus - AGENTS.md.pdf
is a self-contained introduction: what the format is, what belongs in the file,
and why a neutral, community-governed convention is worth adopting. It assumes
no prior exposure to agentic coding tools and takes a few minutes to read.
It is published as a PDF so it can be read, downloaded, and cited independently of any platform.
The long-form companion to the carousel: A README for Agents: What AGENTS.md Is, and What the Evidence Says.
The carousel introduces the format; the article goes further and looks at what the available evidence actually supports about adopting it.
- Engineers evaluating whether AGENTS.md is worth adding to a repository.
- Teams that already use a coding agent and want its guidance versioned with the code, reviewed like code, rather than retyped in a prompt every session.
- Platform and architecture teams standardizing agent context across many repositories or a monorepo.
This repository is part of AAIF Project Focus, a series covering one Agentic AI Foundation project per episode:
| Episode | Project | Repository |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Model Context Protocol: how an agent reaches your systems, under governance | model-context-protocol |
| 2 | AGENTS.md: how a repository explains itself to an agent | this repository |
| 3 | goose: the runtime that brings them together | goose |
The three are the founding projects of the foundation, and they answer different questions: MCP is connectivity, AGENTS.md is context, goose is where both are put to work. Capability, context and runtime are different problems, solved by different artifacts.
All repositories are indexed in the AI Native Hub, and the deep-dives behind each build are at www.christiandussol.dev.
- agents.md: the format, the specification, and examples.
- Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF): the vendor-neutral home of AGENTS.md, MCP, and the other projects covered in this series.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0), © 2026 Christian Dussol.