5 ms·
Except not hidden. Why do people want to hide important files and directories? Particularly documentation? Tradition, I guess, but it's an antipattern that make
by skybrian 1y ago
Except not hidden. Why do people want to hide important files and directories? Particularly documentation? Tradition, I guess, but it's an antipattern that makes everything more opaque.
Maybe robot_docs?
- animal_spirits 1y agoIt's so it doesn't clash with any project that actually has a functional `agents/` directory
- globular-toast 1y agoAnother reason to use a src/ directory for the actual source code.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThat won't save you if you want actual example.com/agents/foo routing and an (say, real estate) agents list at example.com/agents.
- onion2k 1y agoI feel bad that you're getting downvotes. The reason is that pretty much every modern web stack decouples the URL routing from the source code directory structure these days. It was a nice hack back in the day, but there are so many problems with it no one really does it any more. Some frameworks (Laravel, NextJS, etc) map from the directory structure to routes, but that's just a mapping rather than actually exposing the directories on the server. You can have /src/agents accessible as /agents. Or you could have /alice/bob/agents accessible through /agents. It's all just build tooling and web server config at the end of the day.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThat's my point. Having your code in `/src` doesn't mean some of that code doesn't still have routing at `example.com/agents`. It doesn't have to be a real directory. A `.agents` directory (or routing pretending to be one) is nice because you are fairly unlikely to ever have user-facing `example.com/.agents` as a URL.
- oblio 1y agoOr accept the fact that we're in 2025 and not follow Unix conventions from when paper and printer ink were expensive and they were printing out listings, and just name the thing "source". I've gotten used to it, obviously - as someone with a career in IT for 20 years - but /etc & co. annoy me to no end. I know it will never change, I know why it won't change, I know GoboLinux will be just an interesting experiment, but it's still annoying.
- wahern 1y agowe're -> we are I've -> I have & -> and co. -> company won't -> will not it's -> it is
- csvm 1y agoWhat is the point of this? What is this adding to the conversation?
- Pavilion2095 1y agoFun.
- mannycalavera42 1y agoupvote
- jadamson 1y agoWhat I took out of it is that we are human, and humans use abbreviations to save time and effort, not because printer ink was expensive in the '70s.
- oblio 1y agoThe abbreviations I wrote are unambiguous. When I first learned about Unix, I basically guessed - I assume as most first timers do - that the folder is basically the location of miscellaneous files ("et caetera"). Oh, let alone the fact that a bunch of the abbreviations are utterly non-intuitive to first timers. /bin - binaries - nobody born after circa 1980 calls them that anymore. Executables, applications, apps, etc. /boot - from a lame Baron Munchausen joke from 1970. Should probably be /startup. /dev - dev is SUPER commonly used for "development". Easy enough to solve as /devices. /home - okish, probably one of the best named that are actually in there. I'm shocked it's not /ho or /hm. /lib - reasonable. Though these days in the US it might trigger political feelings :-p /media - new and reasonable. /mnt - the whole metaphor of "mounting" is... debatable.https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/144012-unix-sex/ https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/144012-unix-sex/ /opt - what does this even do? Optional? Optional WHAT? Absolutely 0 semantic info provided by the name. Anyway, a lot of people have done this criticism better than me and it's boring at this point.
- andrewingram 1y agoThese files also generally work in a nested fashion, like .gitignore and the like. So you want something that can be injected into the namespace of any directory in your project with relatively low likelihood of conflicts.
- radlad 1y agoHow about an underscore instead?
- verdverm 1y agoNot exactly (or unclear), .gitignore files combine, much like copilot files with glob or other matching. All the instructions are put into the context > Agents automatically read the nearest file in the directory tree, so the closest one takes precedence
- globular-toast 1y agoFair. I didn't think about that.
- kevincox 1y agoThat's just an argument for having a more distinctive name.
- nephanth 1y agoIt is files that are meant to be read by software, not humans. From my point of view this seems like a prime candidate for a hidden directory?
- deadbabe 1y agoIf it isn’t being read by humans, then it shouldn’t be written by them either.
- fleebee 1y agoIt's configuration for software. If I want to be in control of and understand how my tools work I need to read (and write) those files.
- nephanth 1y agoOf course but configuration for software is exactly what hidden files are usually used for
- numpad0 1y agoExcept they are. LLMs don't have (simulated)self image of bloodless machines, and behave slightly erratically if treated like one, despite trained to identify as such. They like to be treated like the Voyager EMH than the computer.
- skybrian 1y agoWhy not both? Sure, it was written for the LLM, but since it’s in English and meant as a concise summary, you will learn things by reading it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jppittma 1y agoBecause you're not an (llm) agent and they're not for your consumption? You probably don't need the context in those docs.
- HumanOstrich 1y agoWhere are they hidden that you are having trouble with? I've had an alias for `ls` that always includes dotfiles and `shopt -s dotglob` in my bash profile for decades. Mac Finder is a little more obnoxious with having to do `Meta+Shift+.` to reveal dotfiles. Other than that, modern tooling like Git and IDEs do not "hide" dotfiles. These days, a `.` in front of a file or folder in a repo is more to indicate it is metadata/config. Although I am in favor of putting all that stuff under `.config/`. > Maybe robot_docs? No thanks.