A README can be a program
First shared: February 27 and June 26, 2025
In February 2025, I started thinking of Cursor’s agent mode as a new kind of runtime. You could put a program in a Markdown file at the top of an empty repository, ask the agent to run it, and use the file system to keep state.
By June, with agents running asynchronously and in parallel, I was using something closer to an event-driven toolchain. On each pull request, one model could perform a security audit while another reviewed code quality, lint and patterns.
The repository served as the machine’s state. Each run could write what happened there, and subsequent runs could read it.
The executable README was the program. The agent and its tools were the computer.