CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, DESIGN.md — Markdown in the AI Era
Ever opened someone else’s repository after a while and found a bunch of unfamiliar files sitting there? Next to README.md there’s a CLAUDE.md, an AGENTS.md shows up too, and some repos even have a DESIGN.md. They’re all .md files, but what are they actually for? They’re all documents written to be read by AI — not by people. Just a few years ago, the only markdown files in a repository were the README and maybe a license. But now that AI coding tools have become part of everyday work, projects need to tell AI, too, “here’s how we do things around here.” Instead of repeating the same explanation in chat every time, teams started writing it down in files. That’s how we ended up with the files you’re looking at now. ...
