Everything is Text...

I’ve been writing code with LLMs for nearly two years. I’ve tried all sorts of tools, pushed tools through every workflow. But the breakthrough wasn’t a new app or model or even a better prompt — it was the humble markdown file. Plain, portable markdown text. With LLMs, the game is in how you get your context to the model. And the more you treat as text, the more you unlock.

For all the slick features offered to get context to the LLM tool, the crux of it is: how do we canonize our mental model for the agents to act as precisely as we desire. And we canonize in markdown files. These markdown files — best practices, PRDs, todos — are all the lifeblood for agents. What’s the shape these files should take so I can integrate seamlessly with the LLM tools? And how could I decentralize and democratize the todos to be accessible from more devices?

And I landed on: what if it’s all text? What if it’s all markdown? What would it be like to fully bend to the form factor for which LLMs optimize?

So I settled on three files: AGENTS.md, PRD.md, and a TODO.md. Agents to describe the how. A PRD to describe the vision. These two are more stable. But Todo describes what’s happening next. It’s the most malleable and receives the most reads and writes. It needs to follow me.

While the markdown files were portable between LLM tools, they were stuck on my machine. This wasn’t so bad for the first two files, but the Todo was my workhorse. Then I had my a-ha moment. I use Obsidian as my notes app. It syncs markdown files across devices and to the cloud. So I took all of my side projects’ Todo files, moved them to Obsidian, and created symlinks from their original directory. Now I can update my coding agents’ next todos from my phone. And when I’m at my machine, they’re ready to be picked up. The context follows me, not the other way around.

When more of your work is text, the LLMs and the device syncing flow seamlessly. The dream of the always-on agent doesn’t have to be driven by tools or models. It’s about context. It’s always been about context. And that context is just text. We just need to move it where it needs to be.