A stated persona and background
Behavioral framing
The first line assigns the agent a role and a specialism, naming distributed systems, database engines and scalable platforms. It is the only file in the directory that opens this way.
AGENTS.md directory
Temporal
Durable execution service for workflows.
Opens by assigning the agent a persona and an output length limit.
By the numbers
- 105
- Lines
- 1,217
- Words
- about 6 min read
- 8.3kB
- File size
- 11
- Headings
- 63
- Bullet rules
- 0
- Code blocks
- 0
- Links to other docs
- 23k
- Repo stars
File measured on main at commit 109a38e. Analysis written 2026-09-14. Star count is a snapshot from September 2026.
What kind of file this is
Begins with a role description and a set of core mandates, then covers tone, project structure, commands, testing and a planning procedure. Contains no code blocks.
Techniques in this file
Quoted lines are verbatim from the file. Open one to see it where it sits.
Rules on how much to say
A Tone and Style section sets a target of fewer than three lines of text per response excluding tool use and code, and rules out preambles, postambles and conversational filler by example. Clarity is named as the exception where an explanation is genuinely needed.
A planning procedure with named trade-off categories
Planning is broken into seven steps, ending with four trade-off dimensions to discuss (performance, scalability, complexity, security) and a requirement to reason about failure modes, given as crash behavior and a tenfold load increase.
A comment convention for deferred design
House vocabulary
Future design considerations are recorded with a specific prefixed comment form that carries the author's name, giving deferred thinking a greppable marker.
Comments are not a channel to the user
Hard prohibitions
The comments rule ends by prohibiting the agent from addressing the user or describing its changes through code comments, and from editing comments that are separate from the code being changed.
Test conventions with the enforcing linter named
Several testing rules carry the tool that enforces them: a linter forbids sleeping in tests in favour of an eventually helper, and a testify linter enforces the float comparison and error assertion forms.
Takeaways for your own repo
- If your agents narrate their work in code comments, prohibit it explicitly. It is a common default.
- Give deferred design decisions a greppable comment marker with an owner.
- Name the linter that enforces a rule so the agent can predict the failure before CI.
- Set an expected response length if agent verbosity is a problem for your team.
How the file is organized
- 01Core Mandates
- 02Tone and Style
- 03Project Structure
- 04Important Commands
- 05Best Practices
- 06Error Handling
- 07Testing
- 08Software Engineering Tasks
- 09Planning
Context your AGENTS.md cannot carry
Temporal's file tells an agent how the codebase works. It cannot tell it which bug three customers hit this week. Modem keeps that context current and attaches it to the work.