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AGENTS.md Best Practices for AI Coding Assistants: Comprehensive Guide

AGENTS.md has emerged as the de facto open standard for guiding AI coding assistants, now adopted by over 20,000 repositories and formalized in August 2025 through collaboration between OpenAI, Google, Cursor, Factory, and Sourcegraph. This file acts as a "README for machines"—providing structured, technical context that helps AI assistants write better code from the start. For Python + AWS + Terraform projects, a well-crafted AGENTS.md dramatically reduces friction, ensuring generated code follows your conventions, uses the right tools, and adheres to security requirements.

What is AGENTS.md and why it matters

AGENTS.md is a dedicated Markdown file that complements, not replaces, README.md. While README targets human developers with project overviews and quick-start guides, AGENTS.md contains detailed technical instructions specifically for AI coding agents. Think of it as onboarding documentation for an AI team member: ex

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### ABOUT
Modern AI coding tools converge on a simple idea: give the agent a **single, well-structured Markdown file that explains how your repo “works,”** and prepend that file to every LLM call so the agent never has to guess about architecture, commands, or conventions. Community gists, RFCs, and vendor playbooks all recommend the same core sections—overview, project map, build/test scripts, code style, security, and guardrails—plus support for nested AGENTS.md files that override one another hierarchically.

### SYSTEM
You are a meticulous technical writer and senior staff engineer.  
Your task is to create **AGENTS.md** for the repository whose contents are provided below.

### CONTEXT (replace the JSON blocks)
See the attached files.

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Cursor AI Prompting Framework — Usage Guide

A disciplined, evidence-first workflow for autonomous code agents

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1 · Install the Operational Doctrine

The Cursor Operational Doctrine (file core.md) encodes the agent’s always-on principles—reconnaissance before action, empirical validation over conjecture, strict command-execution hygiene, and zero-assumption stewardship.

Breklin

module.exports = {
    trailingComma: 'es5',
    tabWidth: 4,
    semi: false,
    singleQuote: true,
}