AI has become part of our lives, whether we like it or not, and it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.
People seem to be using AI on many different levels, ranging from those still trying to avoid it, to people actively playing with it, trying to break it and find its limitations.
The same goes for companies. There are those still barely using AI, those using it for absolutely everything, hoping it's a magical solution to their problems, and those in between.
If you're more on the heavy use side, agents and instruction files are probably part of your daily discussions now.
For our AI’s to work correctly they need the correct instructions, so they know how we want them to respond, how our project works, etc. We can use .md files to supply these instructions and/or context to the models.
Those little markdown files are getting a huge importance in the development lifecycle. Since we can use the same file in each request we make, we can put in it the specifics of our project, as detailed as we want, so the model has as much information as possible to work with. “Garbage in, garbage out” makes sense here because, in theory, the better information the model has, the better results it can provide. Because of that, we're having to be more careful with the way we write them.
Although markdown isn't something new, I don't know about you, but I haven't done much markdown writing before, so this feels like another tool to learn, like we're adding a new language on our tech stack.
When I say is something else to learn, I don't mean learning only the markdown syntax, but also the correct way of writing all the instructions.
A development stack now could look like: HTML, CSS and JavaScript for frontend, a language like Java, a framework like Spring or Quarkus, and SQL for the backend, and now .md files and markdown for the agents.
I know I'm being very simplistic here, there are a lot more pieces of technology I didn't mention, but you got the idea, right?
Besides everything else we have to know, are .md files and markdown becoming a permanent part of our tech stack? Do you see yourself in your next interview saying “I can work with frontend, backend, databases and .md files?”
Top comments (2)
I don’t think we’re becoming developers of .md files. I think we’re becoming developers of intent. For years we spent most of our time telling computers exactly how to do something. Now we’re spending more time explaining what we want, what constraints exist, what good looks like, and what should never happen. Markdown just happens to be the medium.
The interesting shift isn’t the file format. It’s that specification, context, and decision-making are becoming first-class engineering skills.
On the 'new language to learn' point I'd push back gently. Writing the instructions down is the same skill as saying precisely what you want, which was always the job, only now it lives in a file the model reads. The newer skill is keeping that file short. People treat it as a dumping ground and pour everything in, and past a certain size the model stops attending to the middle, so a 600-line instructions file can give worse results than a 60-line one. The work is pruning it as much as writing it.
prickles.org/tenet/working-context...