agents-md

AI agent context files like AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and LLMs.md enforce non-discoverable constraints on agent behavior. You need them to provide explicit guardrails around prompts, tool usage, and hard safety rules that cannot be inferred directly from your code or data.

To create an AGENTS.md file, define non-obvious test or lint commands, required tooling constraints, and hard safety rules. Avoid unrelated documentation like repo structure overviews to maintain minimal, focused guardrails for your AI agent.

You should exclude repo structure overviews and unrelated documentation from CLAUDE.md and LLMs.md files. These context files should focus strictly on non-discoverable constraints, avoiding information that agents can easily infer from the codebase.

Yes, agent context files should include non-obvious test, lint, and build commands. Specifying these required tooling and environment constraints ensures the AI agent executes the correct validation steps that cannot be inferred from the code.

The best way to maintain consistency is applying a standardized framework to create, review, and trim AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and LLMs.md files. This workflow ensures non-discoverable constraints are clearly defined and maintained across projects.

Your AI agent ignores safety requirements because they are non-discoverable constraints not present in the code. Defining hard safety rules and tool usage guardrails explicitly in an AGENTS.md context file enforces these required behaviors.