[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #63901: Add `AGENTS.md` for the project

[WordPress Trac]

#63901: Add `AGENTS.md` for the project
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 Reporter:  flixos90          |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement       |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal            |   Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Build/Test Tools  |     Version:
 Severity:  normal            |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                    |     Focuses:
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Comment (by justlevine):

 Felt it important to come back and highlight that yet again a tool that
 was ostensibly supposed to improve results when working with an LLM is now
 being said to [https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ | produce worse
 results  vs traditional best practices] that we already enforce. That
 doesn't mean that ~~LLMs.txt~~, ~~Structured Markup~~, ~~MCP~~ Agents.md
 is complete hype, it just a reminder we should to test the results of
 adopting this tool at least the same amount we would for any other.

 As to why not go with our gut and iterate by trial and error, I'll remind
 everyone about July's METR report that showed that developers
 [https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
 | consistent felt AI assisted coding tools sped them up, when it was
 actually making them take ~19% longer]. There is a measurable dopamine
 influence involved in how we "experience" AI productivity gains, so it's
 pretty important we rely on something just a bit more concrete than vibes.

 > This is much harder to measure

 We can use the preexisting [https://make.wordpress.org/test/handbook/test-
 reports/ | test report] flow where we come up with a handful of prompts
 for a few different types of tasks/scenarios, and then people share their
 results (branch diff if it was a task or answer if it was a question, chat
 history, model, contents of their AGENTS.md file etc etc). We make a
 template so it's mindless to report, and we compare it to a baseline of no
 AGENTS.md and an AGENTS.md that is just a table-of-contents to existing
 documentation files.

 It's lower barrier-to-entry than contributing normal test reports because
 the tester doesn't even need specific WP or AI knowledge to prompt the
 LLM, nor to even evaluate the results, just report them. Plus it balances
 the presumed model skew based on who's starred this thread (which is
 probably the closest metaphor to traditional "environments" we have right
 now). We don't need a specific threshold on how many to collect just a
 bare minimum of due diligence and a tangible feedback loop.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/63901#comment:12>
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