Another thought just struck me today, though, and comes from the perspective of my current role as a maintainer of heavily-used open source software projects: while an agents file may be a hint that makes us curmudgeons roll our eyes and step away in disgust, the dark forest of vibe coders exists, and they're probably opening PRs on your projects. Some people are probably vibe coding without even knowing it, because LLM-powered autocomplete is enabled in their IDE by default or something. In that reality, an AGENTS.md might also be the best protection you have against agents and IDEs making dumb mistakes that are, often, very hard to notice during a code review. If you maintain projects that welcome third-party contributions, you deserve to at least know that you've given the agents some railings to lean on.

You might not trust vibe coders, but if you can gently guide the vibes, maybe it's worth the cringe or two you'll get from seasoned engineers.

—AGENTS.md as a dark signal, Josh Mock