The AGENTS.md standard, an industry-wide initiative to unify instructions for AI coding agents within software development. Before this standard, the ecosystem suffered from fragmentation, with each AI tool requiring its own proprietary configuration file, leading to significant maintenance overhead and hindered interoperability. AGENTS.md establishes a simple, open Markdown-based format that acts as a dedicated "onboarding document" for AI agents, separating their instructions from human-facing documentation like README.md. This collaborative effort, supported by major players like OpenAI and Google, aims to streamline AI-assisted workflows, foster competition, and ensure that AI agents can effectively understand and contribute to projects, even within complex monorepos. The standard is seen as a foundational element that will shape the future of AI tooling and human-agent collaboration in software engineering.