Ai Agent Cheatsheet

AI Agent Developer Reference

A community-maintained reference for developers navigating the AI coding agent ecosystem. Tools, instruction files, orchestration patterns, and what actually changed this week — all in one place.

**Live site:** https://thegoo.github.io/ai-agent-cheatsheet

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What's covered

Section	What you'll find
Compatibility Matrix	Which instruction files each tool reads natively
File Reference	What each file does, where it lives, starter templates
Tool Landscape	Category map of CLI agents, IDEs, cloud agents, orchestration layers — plus parallel sub-agent comparison table
Orchestration Patterns	Three patterns (Fire and Forget, Coordinated Team, Async Background) with tool mapping and config file references
Projects	Notable tools and collections that extend or orchestrate instruction files
Tips & Pro Tips	Basics for everyone + advanced patterns for teams running real agentic workflows
Changelog	What's changed in the ecosystem and when

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Instruction files covered

File	Tools
AGENTS.md	Universal — Copilot, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Cline...
CLAUDE.md	Claude Code, GitHub Copilot
.github/copilot-instructions.md	GitHub Copilot (repo-wide)
*.instructions.md	GitHub Copilot (path-scoped, .github/instructions/)
*.agent.md	GitHub Copilot (custom agent personas, .github/agents/)
*.prompt.md	GitHub Copilot (reusable prompts, .github/prompts/)
GEMINI.md	Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot (Gemini model)
SKILL.md	Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf
.claude/agents/*.md	Claude Code (custom sub-agents)
.claude/commands/*.md	Claude Code (slash commands)
.cursor/rules/*.mdc	Cursor (4 loading modes)
openai-codex/setup.sh	OpenAI Codex
.github/agents/*.agent.md	GitHub Copilot (GA April 2026, replaces .chatmode.md)

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Tools