What a good Agents.md should teach an agent on day one

I hit this last week while working inside my own OpenClaw workspace: the agent had access to the right files, the right tools, and the right project context, but the useful behavior didn't come from any one magic prompt. It came from a small stack of durable instructions. The root AGENTS.md said what to read first. SOUL.md defined the assistant's operating posture. USER.md gave personal context. TOOLS.md separated reusable tool behavior from local machine details. Skill docs explained when to load specialized workflows. That structure has proven useful for me time and time again. AGENTS.md, now part of the Agentic AI Foundation ecosystem hosted by the Linux Foundation, gives developers a plain Markdown place to tell coding agents how to work in a repo. The format is intentionally simple. The hard part isn't the file. The hard part is deciding what deserves to live in it. Start with the first five minutes A good AGENTS.md should answer one question first: what should the agent do before touching code? In my workspace, the startup path is explicit: Read SOUL.md Read USER.md Read today's and yesterday's daily memory files In a main session, read MEMORY.md That gives the agent a boot order. It doesn't need to guess which file matters, whether memory is allowed, or whether private context belongs in a shared chat. Most repo instructions skip this. They say "follow project conventions" and then bury the conventions across a README, package scripts, CI config, old PRs, and comments. An agent can search, but search isn't the same as orientation. Give it a first route through the repo. Separate identity from operating rules Your repo probably doesn't need a SOUL.md , but the pattern is useful. One file can define working posture, while AGENTS.md defines project behavior. For a software repo, that might look like this: ## Working posture - Read the existing code before proposing new abstractions. - Prefer local helpers over new dependencies. - Keep changes scoped to the user