I would love to have this, but I think we should think about a system to sync these between all the exporters. I don't want to hand-maintain 70+ of these across the community.

I would love to have this, but I think we should think about a system to sync these between all the exporters. I don't want to hand-maintain 70+ of these across the community.

Thanks for raising this @SuperQ
One idea that could helps by leveraging infrastructure we already have:

How it would work

Each exporter repo gets two files:

node_exporter/
├── AGENTS_EXPORTERS.md   ← synced automatically, do not edit manually
└── AGENTS.md             ← maintained per-repo, imports the common part

AGENTS.md in each exporter starts with:

@AGENTS_EXPORTERS.md

## Project-specific guidelines
... exporter-specific content ...

AGENTS_EXPORTERS.md contains the shared conventions across all exporters (metric naming, collector patterns, contribution rules, etc.) and is distributed automatically via the existing sync_repo_files.sh mechanism, the same one that already propagates Makefile.common, LICENSE, and other common files across the ecosystem.

Why this approach

• Local file reference (@AGENTS_EXPORTERS.md), no external URL fetching, works natively with any agent that supports local file imports (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor)
• Each repo stays independent maintainers freely edit AGENTS.md for project-specific content without affecting the synced file
• Reuses existing infrastructure, no new tooling, no new repos, just an additional file in the sync list

What would need to change

1. Add AGENTS_EXPORTERS.md to the source repo that sync_repo_files.sh pulls from
2. Add AGENTS_EXPORTERS.md to the list of files the script distributes to exporter repos
3. Each exporter gets an AGENTS.md (like this PR) with @AGENTS_EXPORTERS.md at the top — this could also be bootstrapped by the sync script on first run

The content split would be something like:

AGENTS_EXPORTERS.md (common): metric naming conventions, node/exporter namespace rules, collector patterns, how to run tests, fixture update workflow, contribution guidelines common to all exporters.

AGENTS.md (per-repo): project-specific entrypoints, collector inventory, build quirks, OS-specific notes.

WDYT? Happy to send a PR to the sync script if this direction makes sense.

Yeah, I think we should have most of these guidelines on the website, and in AGENTS.md we just point to the website and add what is specific to each exporter