AGENTS.md for AI Coding Assistants: Best Practices for API Docs

AGENTS.md is a cross-platform Markdown standard for giving AI coding assistants such as Copilot, Cursor, and Codex project-specific instructions, including API purpose, authentication syntax, authoritative documentation links, common errors, and non-obvious conventions. Placed in a repository root and optionally in subdirectories, these files provide default guidance that can be overridden by direct user prompts, helping agents avoid guessing about endpoints, headers, and integration patterns. Research cited suggests that concise, human-written files of roughly 100 to 150 lines can improve task speed, token efficiency, and output quality, while overly long, poorly scoped, or automatically generated files may reduce success and increase costs. Teams are advised to version and regularly maintain AGENTS.md alongside code, move detailed material into linked references, and ensure it reflects current API behavior. The piece also presents ReadMe tools, including an MCP server, automatically generated LLMs.txt, and an in-documentation AI assistant, as complementary ways to provide AI tools with current published API documentation.

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