Add AGENTS.md for AI-agent contributors#1157
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Points agents at the existing README workflow and Style-and-Tone guide, and adds one rule not covered by either: no smart/curly quotes or apostrophes, since a curly character silently corrupts shell single-quoted strings, JSON, regexes, and code spans in a way plain ASCII never does. 🤖 Generated with Claude Code
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I'll moan about LLM-generated unnecessary extended characters whenever I see ’em 😁... For source code — and the content of this repo is source code — the ASCII character set is complete enough to represent the entire extended display content used. We support translations via Weblate for languages that require extended character support for accurate and natural representation of text content. For structural and English content, standard ASCII should be preferred with HTML character entities where essential. |
ann0see
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Jul 21, 2026
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| ## Submit | ||
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| - Target `next-release` if the change needs translation, `release` if not (README's workflow section explains which). |
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Unfortunately somethimes this is not true. We probably need to clarify how it actually works...
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Any way to detect when to use one or the other?
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Hard to say as it's a case by case basis. Everything on release gets published immediately and merged to next-release. Everything on next release will only get released once we open a PR, tag a release and squash it to release. Maybe let your LLM analyze the issues/PRs to find the correct pattern.
Moves the substantive dash/hyphen/quote/ellipsis guidance into Style-and-Tone.md (applies to all contributors, not just agents) next to the existing Units section, which does the same kind of micro-convention work. AGENTS.md keeps a pointer plus the one rule that's genuinely agent-specific: check the diff for stray curly characters near code, since that's an LLM/paste failure mode rather than a human typing habit. Unifies the two prior asks in this area: the original "always straight ASCII" quotes rule (safe wherever the text could be pasted into a shell/JSON/regex/code span) and the "use en/em dash where typography calls for it" split from PR jamulussoftware#1159, under one principle -- machine context stays ASCII, human-read prose gets the correct character.
Per ann0see's review comment on jamulussoftware#1157: there's no reliable file-type rule for branch targeting. release publishes immediately and is auto-merged into next-release by CI (.github/workflows/main.yml); next-release only ships at the next release cutover. Point agents at checking recent PR precedent instead of a false-confidence heuristic, and default to the cheaper-to-correct branch when still unsure.
Rewrite AGENTS.md around the idea that documentation is not code: the bar for a change is whether it is better than what is there now, and doc fixes ship on their own schedule rather than waiting on code work. Trim to the rules an agent cannot infer: English-source-only editing, ASCII in machine-parsed contexts, British spelling, and how to choose a branch. Voice, terminology and capitalisation are left to the Style and Tone guide rather than restated here, so there is one source of truth for each. Drop the Style-and-Tone punctuation section from this PR for now; a shorter replacement scoped to machine-parsed contexts is in progress. Written in plain ASCII throughout. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
…gents Adds the rule that actually has a failure mode: plain ASCII inside anything parsed or copied - code spans, CLI flags, URLs, frontmatter, dates, versions - where a curly quote or long dash silently corrupts a value the reader pastes elsewhere. In prose, ASCII is described as the safe default that most pages already use, without prohibiting typographic characters or requiring anyone to convert existing pages. This documents what the English source already does: of 27 files in wiki/en and contribute/en, none contains a curly character inside a code span, while 8 use curly quotes in prose - including this guide. Also states in the introduction that these guidelines cover AI-assisted contributions, which is what lets AGENTS.md point here instead of restating voice, terminology and spelling. AGENTS.md regains its pointer to the new section. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The previous wording asked whether a change should be live now, which invites an agent to reason about urgency. Merge history says the determinant is translation, not urgency: across the last 60 merged PRs (jamulussoftware#1039-jamulussoftware#1160), all 15 touching wiki/ went to next-release and none went to release, while all 6 touching _posts/ went to release. wiki/ is the only tree po4a walks, so an English edit there has to wait for the translation sprint rather than appear untranslated on a live page. State that as the rule, with next-release as the default. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Much better. |
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Short description of changes
Adds a top-level
AGENTS.md, mirroring the pattern already in progress for the main jamulus repo (see jamulussoftware/jamulus#3793 / #3789). It points agents at the existing README workflow and Style-and-Tone guide, and adds one rule that isn't covered by either: no smart/curly quotes or apostrophes.Rationale for that rule: a curly
’/“”pasted into a shell single-quoted string, JSON, a regex, or a code span is not the character the parser expects, and corrupts it silently — this is a real, machine-readable-content risk (unlike e.g. em-dash-vs-hyphen debates, which are purely a human-rendered typography/taste question with no parsing consequence in this repo's kramdown/GFM setup, so deliberately left out).Context: Fixes an issue? Related issues
No related issue; happy to open a Discussion first if preferred.
Status of this Pull Request
Draft — proposal for discussion, not necessarily ready to merge as-is.
What is missing until this pull request can be merged?
Feedback on scope/wording; whether this should point to a Discussion instead.
Does this need translation?
NO — agent-facing repo doc, not user-facing site content (same category as README.md).
Checklist