dox

DOX is a tiny framework for keeping AI coding agents oriented inside a project as it grows and changes. It works by maintaining a set of AGENTS.md files, which are plain Markdown documents that AI agents read automatically to understand how a project is structured and what rules apply in each part of it.

The framework creates a hierarchy of these files. A root AGENTS.md at the top of the project holds project-wide instructions and an index of the structure. Subdirectories can each have their own AGENTS.md with local rules specific to that part of the codebase. Before an AI agent makes any edit, it is instructed to walk from the root down to the area it intends to touch, reading the relevant files along the way. After making meaningful changes, it updates the affected AGENTS.md files to keep the documentation current.

The intended outcome is that the AI agent has precise local context before it touches anything, so it makes fewer blind edits, stays consistent with existing conventions, and does not wander into parts of the project it was not asked to change.

There is nothing to install. DOX is just a Markdown file with instructions inside it. You copy the contents of the project's AGENTS.md into your own project's AGENTS.md, and any compatible AI agent will pick it up automatically. If you have an existing project with no AGENTS.md yet, you can tell your agent to initialize the DOX tree and it will create all the child files and indexes from scratch.

The project is created by Agent Zero, an open-source agentic AI framework, and works with Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and similar tools that support AGENTS.md files.