Coding agents

A coding agent needs two things to work well in a zerolith app: the project's own conventions and the framework's rules. zerolith new writes both into every new project, so there is nothing to set up. Each piece is read at a different time, which keeps what the agent always carries small:

What a new project holds

1. The project's AGENTS.md. zerolith new writes an AGENTS.md next to package.json, with the project's commands, the rules that matter most, a table of where each kind of change goes, and a pointer to the skill. Agents that follow the AGENTS.md convention, Claude Code among them, read it at the start of every task. Keep it current as the project grows: when an agent gets something wrong twice, add the rule there.
2. The zerolith skill. An Agent Skill is a folder an agent loads when a task calls for it; this one holds the rules, one pattern for each concept, the commands, a checklist for finishing a change, and every guide and diagnostic code as a reference the agent opens when it needs one. zerolith new writes it into .agents/skills/zerolith/, which Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and most other agents read, and .claude/skills/zerolith/, which Claude Code reads, as the version of zerolith the project installs.

Nothing else needs to run: an agent started in the project finds both on its own. If an agent was already running, start a new session, and commit the files so everyone's agents get them.

Keeping the skill current

The skill is a copy, so it stays at the version it was written for. After upgrading zerolith, run

npx zerolith skill

which replaces both copies with the skill for the new version; zerolith doctor reports skill_outdated until then. The same command adds the skill to a project made without it, by zerolith new --no-skill or before the command line had it.

npx skills add molexxxx/zerolith installs the skill too, with the skills tool: it detects the agents installed on your machine, asks which ones to set up, and copies the skill.

What else an agent can use

• Diagnostics with their fix. Every error and warning carries a stable code and a link to its page, which says what happened and what to do, such as template_frozen_read. zerolith doctor reports the same template mistakes before the code runs, and in a project from zerolith new, npm run check runs the typecheck, the lint, the tests, and the build, so an agent can verify its own work.
• The docs as Markdown. Every page of this site has a Markdown version at its address with .md in place of the closing slash, such as guide/signals.md for the signals guide. llms.txt lists them all, llms-full.txt holds every page but the playground in one file, and api.json lists every export with its documentation. Point an agent at llms.txt when it works without the skill, as in a project that does not use zerolith yet.

Which AGENTS.md is which

The AGENTS.md in your project is the one your agent reads. The AGENTS.md at the root of the zerolith repository is for agents changing zerolith itself, and an app never needs it.