Re: [RFC] Introducing AI Agents to Git Localization

From: Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 5, 2026, 12:54 UTC
Message-ID: <CANYiYbGVs=L-tiDJfrLhDb1O2n9Xv16qCoV_OJjTe_hbWAo1EA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <0207CD38-C811-499D-AFA6-131B0CA825CD@gmail.com>

On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 7:47 PM Yi-Jyun Pan <pan93412@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>
> Hi Jiang Xin,
>
> Not going to focus on if we should use AI or not; just share some best practices
> and opinions for writing content for AI agents.
>
> For the "Technical guidelines for AI tools" section, I would recommend placing this
> section in AGENTS.md (https://agents.md/), which is an open standard for guidelines
> for AI agents to reference, so we leave the main README file clear and concise.
> AI will also refer to them without explicitly mentioning it (@po/README.md).

The best AI coding tools have their own memory files, such as "CLAUDE.md", ".cursorrules", and "GEMINI.md". I tried using "po/AGENTS.md", but it does not automatically provide context. Many capabilities are already documented in "po/README.md", including how to generate po/git.pot, how to update "po/XX.po" files, and how to create location-less PO files. Therefore, I have added the additional AI-related capabilities to "po/README.md".

Show 7 quoted lines

> I hope my agent can assist me with some tedious preparation tasks, so I would like to
> suggest a few useful use cases that would be fantastic if you could document the best
> practices of these use cases in AGENTS.md:
>
> 1. Allow agents to update the base and translation by executing "make po-update PO_FILE=po/XX.po”.
> 2. Based on point (1), I can instruct my agent to retain the previous strings for fuzzy strings translation (msgmerge --previous, custom arguments).
> 3. When I complete the translation, it can also run “msgcat” to create a location-less file.

This change includes a commit that defines a filter for PO files in .gitattributes, so contributors (including AI coding tools) no longer need to worry about submitting location-less PO files.