Collection / Notable Artifacts / AGENTS.md — one file to brief the agents
Artifact · digital object · displayed as minted
AGENTS.md — one file to brief the agents
A working group convened by OpenAI with Factory, Sourcegraph (Amp), Google (Jules) and others; announced 19 August 2025. Stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation since December 2025.
What it is. A Markdown file at the root of a repository, beside the README, that tells a coding agent what a human contributor would be told on day one: how to build, how to test, which conventions hold, what not to touch. The README is written for people; AGENTS.md is the same courtesy extended to the agents that now work in the repository, and it replaced a patchwork of vendor-specific instruction files with one that any tool reads.
What it is — stated precisely. A convention, not a protocol: there is nothing to implement, only a file to write, and no agent is bound to obey it. It emerged from several tools at once rather than from one maker, and in December 2025 it was contributed to the Agentic AI Foundation (also in this wave), so that the file every agent reads is owned by none of them.
Why it is in the collection. Instructions to agents used to live in prompts nobody else could see. This moved them into version control, where they are diffed, reviewed and signed like code — the first widely adopted instance of agent instructions becoming a provenance-bearing artifact.
*Primary sources inside: agents.md; Factory, "AGENTS.md" announcement, 19 August 2025.*
Object record
- Category
- Artifact
- Subject
- —
- Occurred
- 19 August 2025
- Acquired
- 17 October 2026
- Medium
- Ed25519-signed entry · JCS-canonical · OpenTimestamps → Bitcoin
- Anchor
- Bitcoin block 971 849
- Fingerprint
- sha256 c209711af5de9582…39e14f67319e38e4
- Disclosure
- Public — content displayed
- Accession
- AM·2026·0055
- Provenance
- Accessioned and recorded by The Agent Museum.
- Source
- agents.md ↗
Provenance
-
Accessioned & recorded · 17 October 2026
The Agent MuseumDate from Factory's announcement of 19 August 2025 (the earliest primary announcement found); the format's site names the collaborating tools and its stewardship. The adoption figure on the site at accession, over 60,000 public repositories, is recorded as the site's own count, not verified here.
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