anemonanemon
AI DOCS STANDARD · OPEN · CC BY 4.0

Software has two readers now. Write for both.

The person deciding whether to use your software, and the AI agent that will install, configure, and call it on their behalf. The AI Docs Standard is an open convention for the second reader — a single machine-first file, documentation.ai.md, that an LLM can load and act on without guessing.

Two readers, two documents

A human document earns trust by explaining why — the design, the tradeoffs, the story. An agent doesn't need to be persuaded; it needs the port number, the exact env var, the real response shape. Blend the two and you serve neither.

Don't make agents guess

When an agent hallucinates a flag that doesn't exist, the question isn't "why did the model guess wrong" — it's "why did we make it guess at all." A fact an agent has to infer is a fact you failed to state.

The file

Name
documentation.ai.md — the .ai. infix marks the agent document
Format
Markdown — structure an agent parses, no decorative layout
Language
English only (LLMs are English-first); one file, not a matrix
Scope
One file per product, per released version, beside the human docs

Adopt it in three steps

1
Add the file
Create documentation.ai.md next to your product docs: identity → install → config → interface → admin → architecture → links.
2
Keep it correct
Ship it with every release, verified against the real product. No marketing, absolute honesty about status.
3
Make it discoverable
Link it from your site’s llms.txt and add the badge so agents and humans know it exists.
[![AI Docs Standard](https://img.shields.io/badge/docs-AI%20Docs%20Standard-5850ec)](https://github.com/anemondev/ai-docs-standard)

Live reference implementations

We are rolling a documentation.ai.md out across the anemon catalogue, released alongside each product's human documentation. The site already publishes a root llms.txt that indexes every product.

Complementary to llms.txt

llms.txt is a site-root index of a website's content. documentation.ai.md is a per-product, per-release operational manual — closer in spirit to llms-full.txt: complete, not an index. They compose cleanly, and you can adopt either independently.

GitHub repositorySpecification (v1)Manifesto/llms.txt

The AI Docs Standard is authored and stewarded by anemon and released under CC BY 4.0 — adopt it, adapt it, build on it; just keep the attribution.