The Essential Markdown Files for Every Project — Including Agentic Coding
What belongs in README, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and Skills — backed by ETH Zurich research and analysis of 60,000+ repositories
Guide overview
Every software project accumulates documentation debt in the same predictable way. A README gets written on day one, a CONTRIBUTING file gets added when the first external contributor arrives, and then the rest is improvised. For most of software history, that was fine. The audience for these files was human, and humans are forgiving readers who can infer context. Agentic coding has changed the calculus. AI coding agents — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, and their peers — start every session with no memory of your project. They know how to write TypeScript or Python in general, but they do not know that your team uses pnpm instead of npm, that your API client never throws…