Which AGENTS.md should your agents follow?

Agent rules tend to live in a file such as AGENTS.md, and a file can be edited by anyone, agents included. After a few weeks it can be hard to say which version the agents were meant to follow, and who decided that.

What Smeldr does well is keep the decision: that a given version of the rules is the one that counts, who ratified it, what it replaced, and what rests on it. It does not hold the file, hand it to an agent, or check that the agent read it.

One way to handle it is to record a Decision that pins AGENTS.md to a commit, with a hash of its content, and to place it in an Area that covers the file. An agent can propose the Decision, and a person ratifies it. When the rules change, a new Decision replaces the old one, and the history keeps both.

To make it a habit and not a hope, you could add a line to AGENTS.md itself: before you plan, ask Smeldr which Decisions apply, and ask again before you change files. Other teams may prefer to let a pull request that changes the file wait for an approver, or to do both.

How strict you are is up to you. Smeldr gives you something to check against, and what you do with the answer is your choice.

What is described here is what Smeldr does. The way to use it is a suggestion. See Find the Decisions that apply for how an agent asks, and read the other stories in How Smeldr works in practice.