Yeah I agree. I think the best place for all this lives in CONTRIBUTING.md which is already a standard-ish thing. I've started adding it even to my private projects that only I work on - when I have to come back in 3 or 4 months, I always appreciate it.
My current thought is that (human) contributors should be encouraged to `ln -s CONTRIBUTING.md CLAUDE.local.md` or whatever in their local checkout for their agent of choice, have that .gitignored, and all contributors (human and LLM) will read and write to the same file.
The "new" thing would be putting CONTRIBUTING.md into subfolders as appropriate - which could often be quite useful for humans anyway.
Yeah I think having a docs/contributing folder or equivalent, essentially referenced/linked in the CONTRIBUTING.md makes a bunch of sense, but I'd leave that kind of thing more or less up to the project
If there were already a universal convention on where to put that stuff, then probably the agents would have just looked there. But there's not, so it was necessary to invent one.
Reality is just that people neglected onboarding docs until LLM-based coding agents put them in a position to directly benefit from having more knowledge of the codebase explicitly written down.
Yeah I agree. I think the best place for all this lives in CONTRIBUTING.md which is already a standard-ish thing. I've started adding it even to my private projects that only I work on - when I have to come back in 3 or 4 months, I always appreciate it.
I agree.
My current thought is that (human) contributors should be encouraged to `ln -s CONTRIBUTING.md CLAUDE.local.md` or whatever in their local checkout for their agent of choice, have that .gitignored, and all contributors (human and LLM) will read and write to the same file.
The "new" thing would be putting CONTRIBUTING.md into subfolders as appropriate - which could often be quite useful for humans anyway.
Yeah I think having a docs/contributing folder or equivalent, essentially referenced/linked in the CONTRIBUTING.md makes a bunch of sense, but I'd leave that kind of thing more or less up to the project
If there were already a universal convention on where to put that stuff, then probably the agents would have just looked there. But there's not, so it was necessary to invent one.
Reality is just that people neglected onboarding docs until LLM-based coding agents put them in a position to directly benefit from having more knowledge of the codebase explicitly written down.
Common sense takes time to sink in.