Dynamically loading nested AGENTS.md

[kszlim]

What variant of Codex are you using?

CLI

What feature would you like to see?

Similar to how Claude Code will do "CLAUDE.md files in child directories load on demand when Claude reads files in those directories".

It would be useful if codex could do the same. It's a little annoying that you have to launch codex from the right directory instead of just launching it from the root of your project directory.

I think this is a much more natural workflow, though it might come at the expense of some context.

Additional information

No response

[github-actions]

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

• #Agent does not read AGENTS.override.md #11838

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[kszlim]

I don't believe the linked issue is a duplicate, it has some overlap, but this is more of a feature request.

[miraclebakelaser]

+10 to this. This sort of auto context hydration is a low-hanging fruit for improving agent perf. Launching codex from within subdirectories is a suboptimal solution to this because it means arbitrarily walling off work on different parts of the same repo into separate projects/environments.

It's also part of the AGENTS.md standard:

4. Large monorepo? Use nested AGENTS.md files for subprojects
   Place another AGENTS.md inside each package. Agents automatically read the nearest file in the directory tree, so the closest one takes precedence and every subproject can ship tailored instructions. For example, at time of writing the main OpenAI repo has 88 AGENTS.md files.

--

I think this is a much more natural workflow, though it might come at the expense of some context.

It's the opposite, it affords you more context bc it reduces the need for a monolithic root AGENTS.md.

[foontinz]

• on this feature

[Lewiatan]

+1 on this

[amit-mittal]

Until this feature is implemented, we have added below in our AGENTS.md and it seems to be working fairly well.

## Enhancing Context
- Before doing or planning changes under `go/` directory, always load `gocode/AGENTS.md`.
- Before doing or planning changes under `python/` directory, always load `python/AGENTS.md`.
- If there are any other `AGENTS.md` in any of the parent directories of the relevant files, load them in the context too.

[amakarenko-sumy]

+1 on this

[MuhammedAlkhudiry]

temporary fix add to global AGENTS.md

In a monorepo, if the work include one repo or package or more, read its nested `AGENTS.md`.