Re: [PATCH 1/4] agents: add unified agent coding assistant configuration

Kevin Hilman
2025-07-30T22:06:28Z

Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org> writes:

> Create a single source of truth for agent instructions in
> Documentation/AI/main.md with symlinks for all major coding
> agents:
> - CLAUDE.md (Claude Code)
> - .github/copilot-instructions.md (GitHub Copilot)
> - .cursorrules (Cursor)
> - .codeium/instructions.md (Codeium)
> - .continue/context.md (Continue)
> - .windsurfrules (Windsurf)
> - .aider.conf.yml (Aider)

This doesn't work for aider, probably because the .md it links to is not
YAML. When I start aider with this, I get:

aider: error: Couldn't parse config file: while scanning a simple key
in "/work/kernel/linux/.aider.conf.yml", line 3, column 1
could not find expected ':'
in "/work/kernel/linux/.aider.conf.yml", line 4, column 1

Not related to this series, but related to aider... I'm curious if
anyone has got aider to work with the kernel repo. It seems to have
problems with large repos. When starting in the kernel, I get:

Unable to list files in git repo: cannot close exported pointers exist
Is your git repo corrupted?
Unable to read git repository, it may be corrupt?
cannot close exported pointers exist

but neither claude nor gemini-cli have any problems with the same repo.

The aider FAQ[1] mentions using .aiderignore to ignore parts of the
repo, but even with an "ignore everything" rule, I get the same error,
so something seems wrong with aider and large repos.

Kevin

[1] https://aider.chat/docs/faq.html#can-i-use-aider-in-a-large-mono-repo