The fastest-growing products today are open source. Tools like PostHog, Supabase, n8n, Postiz, or Resend have supercharged their growth by being extremely transparent.
Their growth is coming from agents like Claude, ChatGPT, and Hermes, as they can discover, use, recommend and even contribute back.
I took some time to review how these tools manage their open source and cme up with 5 best practices followed by these companies to make your open source agentic ready... Some are existing standards that became even more important, and others are specific for AI agents.
- Keep It Simple: Use clear naming and simple repo structures so agents can quickly understand what the product does and where things live.
- Write Docs for Agents: Use README, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, skills, robots.txt, and llms.txt to give agents clear instructions and context.
- Give Agents a Way to Use the Product: APIs, MCPs, CLIs, SDKs, examples, and templates so agents can interact with the product directly.
- Make It Easy to Run: Make setup simple, support self-hosting when relevant, document required keys, and make licensing and product boundaries clear.
- Make Contributing Easy: Define contribution rules, testing, reviews, and AI-assisted contribution policies so agents can make valid changes.
Main Takeaways:
- Monorepo is the most optimal configuration
- Agentic docs (Agents.md, Claude.md, llms.txt, robots.txt, skills) should be part of the repo
- A setup designed for machines removes friction
- Interfaces (APIs, MCPs, CLI, SDKs) turn every product actionable quickly and into infrastructure.
- You don’t need to open-source everything, just define the boundaries perfectly
- Examples and templates are distribution not only on boarding
Read the full article here.
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