Jamon Holmgren's agentic setup

jamon-agentic-setup.md

Agent Setup -- how I approach setting up a project for AI coding

I've reached a pretty solid workflow for getting the most from agents in my code base. This setup and workflow has significantly reduced how often I have to fix obvious issues caused by agents doing the wrong thing.

This entire guide was hand-written by me, Jamon, with no AI-generated text nor any AI-suggested text or review. Fully human-generated.

Philosophy

My philosophy is based on these concepts:

1. The most limited and valuable time I have is my own time
2. An agent is a multiplier, not a replacement, for understanding and skill
3. An agent should utilize every possible resource to avoid presenting me with poor work
4. Overall quality should not regress over time
5. The agentic system should get smarter over time as it encodes our guidance and adds validations
6. Guidance should be encoded in reusable documentation and skills, not individual prompts or chat sessions
7. Agents should maintain their own knowledge base
8. Progressive disclosure helps with intelligent context management

AGENTS.md

Since this is loaded every session, this should be as small as possible. Agents are good at fanning out and collecting more information as needed. This is a starting point only.

I recommend that this is really confined to core concepts and hand-written (NOT agent-edited).

Note

Note: in all of these examples, I'm using a fake project named PizzaApp. I use ... to omit content for brevity.

# PizzaApp

## This file

This is the entry point for AI coding agents and contains basic project information and links to workflow, conventions, and codebase docs.

## Project Info

Name: PizzaApp
Tech stack: Expo / React Native, TypeScript, ...

## Docs entrypoints

Always load at least the workflow index and the relevant workflow itself. Load the codebase and conventions indexes if you're working on anything code-related.

Workflows: ./docs/workflows/workflow-index.md
Codebase: ./docs/codebase/codebase-index.md
Conventions: ./docs/conventions/conventions-index.md

### Workflows

Workflows provide recipes for how the human wants you to work on types of tasks.

### Codebase

Codebase docs describe systems and features and architecture for the project.

### Conventions

Conventions docs describe the style and structure of how you write code, docs, and more.

### Loading docs

Load only docs that are clearly relevant to the task at hand. To help determine this, the indexes provide a short description. If you need more detail to decide, you may grep the first 7 lines of any file to get more information.

Each doc provides the following within the first 7 lines: Title, Description, Related Docs, Related Code Files.

Full doc structure rules are in `./docs/conventions/docs-conventions.md`.