Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2026

Abstract

As AI coding agents become embedded in software development workflows, developers are beginning to operationalize ethical principles by encoding behavioral rules into repository-level context files for AI agents, such as AGENTS.md files. Rather than examining the ethics of AI agents in the abstract, this vision paper investigates how ethics and values are already being translated for AI agents into actionable instructions that shape agent behavior. Through a preliminary investigation, we find that developers are already embedding guidance related to fairness, accessibility, sustainability, tone, and privacy. These artifacts function as a developer-authored governance layer, translating abstract principles into situated, natural-language directives within development workflows. We outline a research agenda for studying this emerging practice, including how encoded values vary across communities, what governance dynamics emerge when multiple contributors negotiate these files, and whether agents reliably adhere to the constraints specified. Understanding how ethics and values are operationalized for AI agents is essential to ground AI governance in modern software engineering practice.

Keywords

agentic software engineering, AGENTS.md, AI agent configuration, AI coding agents, AI governance, context engineering, responsible AI, software engineering ethics

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

AIware '26: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on AI-Powered Software, Montreal, Canada, July 6-7

First Page

106

Last Page

109

ISBN

9798400726019

Identifier

10.1145/3805760.3814899

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3805760.3814899

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