One could regard it as the first implementation of a robots.txt-like standard for public code: the existence/contents of .robots in a repo/directory implies tha

One could regard it as the first implementation of a robots.txt-like standard for public code: the existence/contents of .robots in a repo/directory implies that the owner wants control over the type of mechanical contributions received, no matter where the code is hosted. It could be opt-in (initially at least), i.e. a .robots with contents "all", "typo" or "whitespace" etc would allow bots of the given type (an empty or missing file would imply "none").