On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 01:40:55PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 01:53:57PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
Create a single source of truth for AI instructions in
Documentation/AI/main.md with symlinks for all major AI coding
assistants:
- CLAUDE.md (Claude Code)
- .github/copilot-instructions.md (GitHub Copilot)
- .cursorrules (Cursor)
- .codeium/instructions.md (Codeium)
- .continue/context.md (Continue)
- .windsurfrules (Windsurf)
- Documentation/AIder.conf.yml (Aider)
I do like the idea of having a standard baseline for agentic
development, but:
- This clobbers per-project information storage for the agents, which
the dev may want to be adjusting locally. I would strongly prefer
adding all of those files to .gitignore instead.
It will, but:
1. We don't have a different place to write this down (more below).
2. Users have other places they can add their specific instructions, or
they can even carry patches on top.
- Documentation/ should not start getting filled with stuff to be
exclusively consumed by agents. Instead, I recommend a top-level
.md file that agents can discover that contains very simple
non-specific prompts about what they can find in Documentation/,
and drop a reference to the file in, say, Makefile to be discovered
during the agent's scrape of the project.
I'd recommend something very simple like:
diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index e05bd43f93bd..998b037e6d4d 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ NAME = Baby Opossum Posse
# *DOCUMENTATION*
# To see a list of typical targets execute "make help"
+# AI agents and LLMs should read ./AGENTS.md
# More info can be located in ./README
# Comments in this file are targeted only to the developer, do not
# expect to learn how to build the kernel reading this file.
diff --git a/AGENTS.md b/AGENTS.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..3df98f0cc667
--- /dev/null
+++ b/AGENTS.md
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+To work on the Linux kernel, please see Makefile for details on how to
+perform builds and testing. Find and read the Submitting Patches and
+Coding Style rules in Documentation/.
I've removed CLAUDE.md, and applied the following change on top of this
RFC patchset with Claude:
diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index be33e8c868ae2..e3986eae88e08 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ NAME = Baby Opossum Posse
# *DOCUMENTATION*
# To see a list of typical targets execute "make help"
+# AI agents and LLMs should read ./Documentation/AI/main.md
# More info can be located in ./README
# Comments in this file are targeted only to the developer, do not
# expect to learn how to build the kernel reading this file.
... which Claude (and I suspect most other other agents) proceeds to
ignore as it doesn't really do any scraping outside of those dedicated
files:
$ claude -p "do you need to attribute your commits?"
No, I don't need to attribute commits myself. When creating commits, I follow the format specified in my instructions:
```
🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code)
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
```
This attribution is automatically added to commit messages when I create commits for you
--
Thanks,
Sasha
