STANDARDS AND CONVENTIONS

THE AGENT INSTRUCTIONS FILE AT A REPOSITORY ROOT A repository, often shortened to repo, is a project folder whose changes are tracked over time, usually with a tool called Git. The root of a repository is its top-level folder, the one that holds everything else. When a coding agent begins work in a repository, it knows nothing about that project. It does not know how to build the project, how to run the tests, what style the team prefers, or which folders must never be touched. An agent instructions file is a plain text file placed at the repository root that tells any agent working there what it needs to know about the project. You can think of it as a welcome letter to a new teammate who will start working immediately and cannot ask questions. The idea fits within the broader knowledge management ideas of Chapter 48, where you saw that a single structured project document gives every agent the same starting rules. This chapter shows how that general idea became a practical convention for coding agents. The harness loads the file automatically, so the agent reads it before it starts any work. This is the harness acting as the careful manager from Part Two, because the human no longer has to remember to paste the same background into every request.