Building an Agentic AI on Markdown Files
Building an Agentic AI on Markdown Files A complete, zero-infrastructure guide to building an AI agent whose brain is a folder of plain markdown files. No database, no vector store, no hosted memory service — just text you can grep, diff, commit to git, and open in any editor. Companion material: this guide is grounded in the markdown-file-agent skill, which ships a verified reference implementation ( agent.py , ~80 lines) and an offline verification harness. The full code is reproduced in Part 11. Table of contents What "agentic" actually means Why markdown files (and when not to) Anatomy of a markdown brain The agent loop The operating manual: AGENTS.md Memory design Tasks and plans Knowledge base and wikilinks Logs and the diary The minimal toolset Reference implementation: agent.py Verifying without burning tokens Patterns that make it useful Security and failure modes Scaling path: grep -> embeddings -> database Real-world precedents A lear...