Stop Asking AI Agents to Guess How Your Repo Works

AI coding agents are getting better, but a lot of repos still make them start from guesswork. They land in a codebase and have to infer: which command installs dependencies which command starts the app which services need to be running which en vars matter which workflow is safe to run whether the repo is actually ready what “done” should look like after a change That is a lot of operational knowledge to hide in scattered README sections, old shell scripts, CI files, tribal memory, and half-working local setup notes. And when an agent guesses wrong, the problem is not always the agent.