posted in Technology
Linux Kernel Developers Consider Adding AGENTS.md To Help Guide AI/LLM Agents
www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Considers-AGENTS-MD
Replying to @Mustachius_Grumpius@thelemmy.club
Which makes sense, if you want some standards across contributions. Setting aside that agent assisted contribution itself is questionable, as long as it is happening, a universal agents file is probably helpful.
Replying to @theherk@lemmy.world
I don’t get why agents.MD needs to be committed. It feels a bit like committing IDE settings, everyone is going to have slightly different preferences, so its better to just have everyone do their own thing. If anything, I prefer to .gitignore itso it doesnt get accidentally committed.
Replying to @CameronDev@programming.dev
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
Replying to @kogasa@programming.dev
but agents do
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.
Replying to @CameronDev@programming.dev
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.