Date: 2026-07-09 Status: accepted Deciders: Thibault Souris (maintainer) Method: decision-loop — ecosystem veille (2026), sourced state of the art, challenge, durable position
Context
The veille confirmed AGENTS.md as the de-facto standard for the agent charter: 60k+ repositories, read by 30+ tools (Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Jules, Amazon Q, and — via @AGENTS.md — Claude Code), stewarded by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation. runward already writes a vendor-neutral AGENTS.md at init (the mission charter). What it does not yet do is treat AGENTS.md as an explicit output of the handover phase — the leave-behind that makes the receiving team, and any harness they later adopt, autonomous from day one.
This is the wedge. The labs productizing the FDE posture leave behind a PDF playbook and a dependency on their service. runward's differentiator is transmission-as-deliverable; emitting the leave-behind in the one format every harness already reads turns that principle into a portable, machine-consumable artifact.
Decision
The handover workflow (transmettre-capitaliser / handover) emits an AGENTS.md as a standard, first-class handover deliverable — distinct from the charter written at init, this one is the leave-behind for the receiving team: the craft rules that govern the system, the judgment boundaries (what the operator decides versus what the agent may do), the verification commands (including how to run runward check --strict), and the never/PR rules. It is written to be consumed by any harness, alongside the runbook, the ADR journal, and the proofs-in-code — never in place of them.
Alternatives discarded
- A vendor-specific profile only (CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md). Ties the leave-behind to one harness; the receiving team may run another.
AGENTS.mdis the neutral standard all of them read. - A bespoke runward handover format. Not portable, not read by any tool — it recreates the lock-in the method rejects.
- A PDF playbook. What the labs' FDE services produce; human-readable but not machine-consumable, and it ages into a shelf document.
Consequences
- Positive. The handover leave-behind is portable and immediately usable by any harness; "transmission as deliverable" and vendor-neutrality are realised in one move; runward is positioned to own the de-facto "leave-behind" standard.
- Negative, accepted. One more emitted artifact to keep aligned with the
AGENTS.mdconvention as it evolves. - On other boundaries. The handover workflow's Definition of Done gains the emitted
AGENTS.md; the doctrine's transmission section names it as the standard format. No change to the gate or the zero-LLM invariant.
Reevaluation trigger (mandatory, dated)
Reopen if the AGENTS.md convention changes materially under AAIF stewardship (structure, required sections), or if a genuinely more widely-read neutral format supersedes it.
Trigger set on: 2026-07-09 · Watched via: the Agentic AI Foundation's AGENTS.md stewardship.
References
AGENTS.md(Linux Foundation / Agentic AI Foundation) — the neutral charter standard.templates/workflows/handover.md,templates/targets/AGENTS.md— the surfaces this ADR touches.- The doctrine's transmission section — where the format is named as standard.