Ada AGENT.md files

LionelDraghi · February 13, 2026, 4:58pm

I just began to use cli IA help in coding (here Mistral vibe).
It kind of works, but is sometimes akward because of ignorance of the Ada dev environment.
For example, it try to ensure that the modified source is well compiled by greping one of the created identifier in the executable file!

The LLM needs more information. Some are depedant on individual choices, for example your version numbering and publishing process, but some are more generic, for example using Alire to update dependencies or identify imported lib, etc.

I found an initiative called AGENTS.md :
README.md files are for humans: quick starts, project descriptions, and contribution guidelines.

AGENTS.md complements this by containing the extra, sometimes detailed context coding agents need: build steps, tests, and conventions that might clutter a README or aren’t relevant to human contributors.
It provides simple guidelines to create agent files, and references to thousands of existing AGENT.md files of all kinds, that give the AI guidelines on “howto” use dev tools, or on coding guidelines, testing policies, etc.
However, I don’t recall seeing any for Ada.

Are you aware of any such files for Ada, either generic or specialized (Alire, SPARK, AUnit, GNAT tooling, etc.)?

To avoid everyone reinventing the wheel, my idea could be to have a “master” AGENT.md that is specific to my project, but that references other files made available by the community. My ownAGENT.md could reference aunit.md or ahven.md depending on my preferences for unit testing.

AdaOrbit · February 13, 2026, 5:26pm

I’m not really knowledgeable about Ai assistance but I have seen some github projects use .github/copilot-constructions.md for copilot. Maybe this might be something for you?

Alire has one but I have never used or tested it.

github.com/alire-project/alire

.github/copilot-instructions.md

3d944003c

# Project Overview

This project is a command-line tool (`alr`) and a supporting library
(`libalire`) designed to manage dependencies in Ada and SPARK projects, and
related operations like initialization, building, and running tests.

This tool fulfills a similar role as `cargo` for Rust, `go` for Go, `opam` for
OCaml, for the Ada language and its subset SPARK.

The tool leverages an online repository of packages (crates) which is a regular
git repository at GitHub, named the "community index".

## Folder Structure

- `/src/alire`: Contains the source code for the library.
- `/src/alr`: Contains the source code for the command-line tool.
- `/src/templates`: Contains generated source files from templates.
- `/doc`: Contains documentation for the project, including index specification
  and user guides, used also for generating the website.
- `/doc/catalog-format-spec.md`: Contains the specification for the

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As how to setup other Ai tools, I have no idea.

Heziode · February 13, 2026, 7:23pm

I have such files, but mainly to enforce a naming convetion.
I will share that later (I am aware from computer).

To my knowledge, I have not seen that for Ada, but it could be helpful.

On my side I have tried “AI” IDE (Windsurf, Cursor, Kilo), and terminal, Claude Code and OpenCode. I currently use Claude Code and OpenCode (I don’t know which one is better., but probably OpenCode ‘cause you can use the LLM you want).
But, TLDR: It does not replace humain, you still needs a human that really understand the language and so, what the LLM produce, even with the strictness of Ada/SPARK.