@sbillinge et al, I'm beginning to rely a lot on AI to manage projects, so I think an AGENTS.md file would be a useful addition. Feel free to amend/simplify as you prefer.

@vincefn Sounds good. We have one that has been trained in the group standards and it is working pretty well, Claude is spitting out group-compliant code on its own now without long conversations, like the students after a year or so of training before. It is honestly easier to get the context in to the .md by asking Claude to do it. The way I did it in the latest project with some success was by asking Claude to use the Billinge-group coding standards that it can find in scikit-package. I see from this file that Claude already knows about scikit-package but I wonder whether you would ask Claude to check with the Billinge group coding standards described in scikit-package and make sure the align with what is written in this md, check whether you agree with them and they are all ok, then we can merge it?

I just asked copilot (but I mostly use Claude as well) to spit out a draft of the AGENTS.md, based on what I knew - making sure there is a human in the loop, and also the bit about scikit-package and the way the changelog/news needs to be added to a PR.

You should change what you want to the AGENTS file, the important thing is it's there so we don't need to say every time to the AI of the moment to remember to check scikit-package, as they always look at that file. Maybe you need to add a specific pointer to the coding standard, I think I pointed out mostly the PR process.

Those coding agents are really a game changer - I finally have unit tests for objcryst (multi-platform and also fox builds), which would have been a pain to write in c++ manually, and is quite trivial to do with an agent...