# We started writing docs for AI agents, not humans — and made it an open standard

> Source: <https://dev.to/kissoid/we-started-writing-docs-for-ai-agents-not-humans-and-made-it-an-open-standard-3ija>
> Published: 2026-08-30 07:50:56+00:00

We build a few developer products — an event-ledger database, an S3-compatible

object store, and others. Over the last few months we noticed a shift: most

people who try them don't start in a browser. They tell a coding agent “add this

to my project,” and the agent does the install and the wiring.

So we started watching agents work against our documentation.

Most of the time it went fine. But every so often the agent would invent a

config flag that didn't exist, or reach for the wrong port, or call an endpoint

that was *almost* right. It wasn't the model being dumb — our docs were written

to persuade and onboard a **human**, and the agent was reconstructing facts from

prose three paragraphs apart. A fact an agent has to infer is a fact you failed

to state.

So per release we started shipping a second file: `documentation.ai.md`

. Not a

terser translation of the human docs — a different document, for a different

reader, held to a stricter standard of precision.

It's English, dense, and self-sufficient: an agent that has read *only* that file

can install, configure and call the product. Fixed sections, in order:

No marketing language. Absolute honesty about status — if something is early or

unaudited, the file says so, because an agent that recommends an unstable feature

to a user because the doc oversold it is a real failure.

Fair question, and we get it a lot. We're not trying to replace

[llms.txt](https://llmstxt.org). It's a great *site-level index* of your content.

`documentation.ai.md`

is a *per-product, per-release operational doc* — closer in

spirit to `llms-full.txt`

: complete, not an index. They compose cleanly.

It worked well enough across our products that we wrote it up as an open standard

(CC BY 4.0), so anyone can adopt it:

If you build developer tools, your users' agents are already reading your docs.

This is just writing the version they actually need.
