As developers we heard for years naming is important.
The reason I write the post is the SOUL.md file, but lets go over the other bad naming choices AI companies made.
AGENTS.md
As I see it the file is the entry point for a coding agent to start exploring the project.
For years we are using README.md for the human entry point to our projects.
So why not go for AI-README.md or CODING-AGENT.md?
.project
To separate the coding agent permissions and other files from the project most of the coding agents use .project as one of the names they recognize. The other common name is the solution name, like .claude or .codex.
Why not use .ai? And in there one or more sub-directories can be added for solution specific things.
SOUL.md
The file as I see it is used to set agent boundaries.
The main gripe I have with that naming is that it humanizes AI. I think we all agree AI as it is now is not sentient. So it is even lower on the scale than an animal. So why give it a thing of ourself we can't even define ourselves?
CONSTITUTION.md seems like a more appropriate name.
llms.txt
While it is not a coding agent related file. I want to include it because the extension doesn't fit the content. The content is markdown.
This is even a bigger violation than generic naming.
Time for a body that governs the AI file naming?
AI isn't a language or a public asset like HTML, it is something in between.
The only thing is certain that AI is not going away, so we have to make long term plans.
The biggest problem will be to get the AI companies on board because they want to set their own standards.
Because LLM's and coding agents read every file you feed them, my solution at the moment is making the files and directories with my preferred naming explicit, for example as a system prompt.
The problem with this method is that the naming schemes will explode, because most people have their opinion about the names.
I feel when the naming is bad for those files/directories, how much are we going to care about the naming of the code files and even worst the code itself?
Or is this just a me problem?
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