Skip to content

Commit 96ea4a6

Browse files
dschoGit for Windows Build Agent
authored andcommitted
Add an AGENTS.md file to help with AI-assisted debugging/development (#6198)
AI-assisted contributions are a reality of open source in 2025 and beyond. Contributors will use AI tools, and that includes the maintainers themselves. Over recent months, I have found AI increasingly useful for the kind of menial, tedious work that does not require much creativity but is highly boring when done by hand: resolving merge conflicts during merging-rebases, chasing down CI failures across platforms, adapting downstream patches to upstream API changes. To that end, I would like to have an `AGENTS.md` file in the code base that helps any LLM to understand the context of the project. A secondary goal of this is to preemptively help outside contributors. The risk is not AI usage per se, but low-quality AI slop: contributions where the human hits "accept" without sufficient context being available to the model (and without proper review by the human, we've all been there), resulting in changes that miss conventions, break patterns, or misunderstand the project's architecture. Git's source code is about as legacy as they come, having grown organically over two decades with no design that AI coding models would readily grasp from a narrow code sample alone. This `AGENTS.md` is designed to raise the floor on AI-assisted contributions by providing enough context that even when a human contributor fails to steer carefully, the model has the information it needs to produce something reasonable. It documents the repository structure, build process, test conventions, the object model and ODB internals, debugging techniques (Trace2, instrumenting tests, bisecting failures), the merging-rebase workflow, conflict resolution patterns, coding conventions (ASCII only, 80 columns, tabs), commit message expectations, and the GitGitGadget contribution workflow. This is information that a human might take for granted, but no coding model will have been trained on specifically. Similar `AGENTS.md` files have recently been added to other repositories in the Git for Windows project: [MINGW-packages](git-for-windows/MINGW-packages#194), [git-for-windows.github.io](git-for-windows/git-for-windows.github.io#88) and [msys2-runtime](git-for-windows/msys2-runtime@1e0ff37).
2 parents 7a30269 + 51d6cdc commit 96ea4a6

2 files changed

Lines changed: 1110 additions & 0 deletions

File tree

.gitattributes

Lines changed: 1 addition & 0 deletions
Original file line numberDiff line numberDiff line change
@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@
77
*.py text eol=lf diff=python
88
*.bat text eol=crlf
99
*.png binary
10+
/AGENTS.md conflict-marker-size=32
1011
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md -whitespace
1112
/Documentation/**/*.adoc text eol=lf whitespace=trail,space,incomplete
1213
/command-list.txt text eol=lf

0 commit comments

Comments
 (0)