Guiding Agentic Coding Systems - An Empirical Study of agents.md Files

An emerging practice in agentic coding systems is the use of agents.md files: structured, human-readable documents that provide instructions, constraints, and contextual knowledge to coding agents. Despite their increasing adoption in tools and workflows, their effectiveness is questioned and the design patterns used remain underexplored.

The goal of this thesis project is to systematically analyze agents.md files from publicly available repositories to identify recurring design patterns, structures, and types of content used to guide agentic coding systems.