What is AGENTS.md?
AGENTS.md is a lightweight, human-readable contract that defines how software agents should behave within a system.
Purpose
- Alignment: Captures the agent’s goals, boundaries, and decision principles.
- Consistency: Standardises behaviour across environments and teams.
- Governance: Makes assumptions, constraints, and safety rules explicit and reviewable.
Typical Contents
- Role & scope: What the agent is responsible for (and what it is not).
- Capabilities & tools: Which actions, APIs, or resources it may use.
- Decision logic: High-level policies, priorities, and escalation rules.
- Constraints: Security, compliance, and operational limits.
- Lifecycle: How the agent is initialised, monitored, and updated.
Why it matters
By externalising intent and rules from code, AGENTS.md improves transparency, auditability, and long-term maintainability of agent-driven systems.
AGENTS.md examples
- Reconmap
- Agency Swarm
- Oh-my-posh
- AWS HPC Recipes
- RabbitMQ server
- AI Agents for Beginners
- Dart Code
- Vercel Labs Agent-skills
- Sentry
- Cloudflare workers SDK