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

A developer tools company has introduced an open standard for writing documentation specifically for AI agents, called documentation.ai.md. The standard, released under CC BY 4.0, is a per-product, per-release operational doc that is dense, self-sufficient, and free of marketing language, ensuring agents can install, configure, and call products without human inference. The company observed that agents often hallucinate config flags or endpoints due to human-oriented docs, prompting the creation of this stricter format.

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.