Agentic Markdown (AMD)
A unified, durable syntax for agent reasoning, action execution, and state management.
Agentic Markdown (AMD) is a proposed extension to standard Markdown that provides a standardized, interoperable, and human-readable communication format for AI agents. It aims to be the "lingua franca" for agentic communication — a format that different agents (Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc.) can read and write to collaborate on the same task across sessions, machines, and model providers.
What is Agentic Markdown?
As AI agents become more prevalent in software development and general task automation, the need for a standardized communication format is critical. Current methods are often vendor-specific and ephemeral. AMD provides a unified, durable syntax for agent reasoning, action execution, and state management.
This version (v0.1.0) of the Agentic Markdown specification focuses on defining tasks for agents, but the specification will evolve to support other kinds of definitions.
Key Benefits
- Context durability: State survives session boundaries and can be committed to version control.
- Human readability: Looks like standard Markdown, easily understood by developers without special tooling.
- Machine parsability: Reliably parsed using simple YAML/Markdown parsers with no ambiguous syntax.
- Token efficiency: Minimizes boilerplate to preserve context window space for task content.
- Interoperability: Translatable to and from model-specific tool-calling formats via a thin preprocessor layer.
Quick Example
A user-reg-input-validation.task.agentic file defines a discrete unit of work for an agent:
---
title: Add input validation to the user registration endpoint
task_type: feature
status: open
scope:
- src/users/
---
## Requirements
1. Replace the query-string token with a one-time token stored in the database.
2. Tokens must expire after 15 minutes.
3. Invalidate the token immediately after it is used.
## Acceptance criteria
- [ ] POST /auth/request-reset stores a token and sends an email.
- [ ] A token older than 15 minutes is rejected.