Agent config is fragmented chaos. Here's how to standardize it.

Every AI-assisted project right now has a different answer to the same question: where does the agent know who it is, what it can do, and how it should behave? Some projects use .cursorrules . Some use .claude/ directories. Some use a giant system prompt in a .env file. Some use .agents/ . Some use nothing and just paste instructions every session. The result: agent config is chaos. Nothing is portable. Nothing is version-controlled consistently. Onboarding a new developer to an agent project means reverse-engineering 15 different places where agent behavior is defined. We ran into this problem at scale — 23 agents, 2 servers, 5 businesses — and iterated our way to a structure that works. Here it is. The Problem With Current Approaches .cursorrules — Cursor-specific. Doesn't work outside Cursor. No concept of identity or multi-agent hierarchy. A flat instruction file masquerading as configuration. .agents/ folders — Better structure, but no standard schema. Every team implements it dif