GEMINI.md

GEMINI.md is a project-level context file read by Google’s Gemini CLI that carries persistent instructions, coding standards, and background about a codebase into every AI-assisted session. It is Google’s entry in the same convention as CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and .cursorrules — a plain Markdown file, committed to the repository, that tells a coding agent how this particular project expects to be worked on. The idea is simple: instead of re-explaining conventions in each prompt, you write them down once and the agent picks them up automatically.

• Project context - Describes the architecture, key directories, and domain concepts an agent needs to be useful.
• Coding standards - Encodes style rules, testing expectations, and patterns the team wants enforced.
• Hierarchical loading - Gemini CLI can merge a global file with per-directory GEMINI.md files for more specific guidance.
• Version-controlled and shared - Living in the repo, it is reviewed, diffed, and shared like any other source file.

In API operations these agent-context files are becoming part of governance itself: the same conventions a team wants humans to follow — how to structure an OpenAPI definition, which linting rules apply, how to name resources — can be written into GEMINI.md so an AI agent applies them by default. As coding agents take on more of the day-to-day work of building and maintaining APIs, files like GEMINI.md turn tribal knowledge and style guides into machine-readable guidance that travels with the repository, which is exactly the direction API governance is heading.