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Creating Rules and Memory

Beginner ~10 min

Your AI coding agent can use markdown files to save information between sessions. You can also supply your own files to provide rules and guidance to customise its behaviour.

Making a Rule File

The file name needs to be one of: AGENTS.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, README.md, DEVELOPER.md, STYLEGUIDE.md

Best practice is to make a .md file containing your desired rules. Save the file in your project folder.

Here is text to start with. Copy and paste it into an AGENTS.md file:

1. First, think through the problem. Read the codebase and write a plan in tasks/todo
2. The plan should be a checklist of todo items.
3. Check in with me before starting work — I'll verify the plan.
4. Then, complete the todos one by one, marking them off as you go.
5. At every step, give me a high-level explanation of what you changed.
6. Keep every change simple and minimal. Avoid big rewrites.
7. At the end, add a review section in todo.md summarizing the changes.
8. Make a memory file and todo file to store information during the session

Choose one way to create the file:

  1. Open RStudio > File > New File > Markdown File > paste text and save as AGENTS.md
  2. Open a text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code) > paste text and save as AGENTS.md
  3. In Terminal, create a file in your project directory: touch path/to/folder/AGENTS.md

Alternative name

You can also name the rules file copilot-instructions.md for GitHub Copilot compatibility.

Start Using Your Rules

Let your model know the file exists by running /init in Build mode.

Now the program will use AGENTS.md as a living document that should be updated manually. It will make a memory.md and todo.md which it will update. These provide information for the project between sessions.