The Plain-Text AI Interface

Your vault isn’t a notebook anymore. It’s a runtime. We previously published “Your Vault Is Your Moat” — the case that your personal knowledge base is the one asset AI can’t commoditize. That piece was about ownership. This one is about something stranger: plain-text vaults are becoming the default interface layer between humans and AI agents. Not by design. By convergence. Six independent signals, none of them coordinated, all pointing the same direction. 60,000 repos have an AGENTS.md file The AGENTS.md standard is a plain-text file that tells coding agents how to work on your project. Build steps, test commands, code style, conventions — all in markdown, sitting in your repo root. Google, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, and OpenAI Codex have adopted it. Claude Code has its own variant ( CLAUDE.md ). Over 60,000 open-source projects now include one. Nobody designed this as a standard. It emerged because every agent builder independently arrived at the same conclusion: put a markdown file i