Documenting your software libraries for agents

This article discusses the shift in software library design and documentation due to the rise of coding agents. The author, an open source software engineer, argues that while libraries remain valuable, their primary consumers are increasingly AI agents rather than humans. Using the example of kr8s, a Pythonic Kubernetes client, the author explains how ergonomic design for humans is becoming less important than clear, type-rich APIs and documentation optimized for machine consumption. The article highlights the 'step zero problem' where agents prefer well-documented, widely-used libraries in their training data, and suggests that future library documentation must prioritize clarity for automated code generation over human readability.