[showxu]

Summary

Repositories that adopt agents commit their instruction units in .agent/instructions/, the declaration .agent/agents.json and the lock .agent/agents.resolved. The source policy reported every .agent path and reference as local task state, so those pull requests failed.

• Paths and references to those three locations are now repository guidance. A reference to the whole directory, such as an ignore rule for .agent/*, names no task file.
• Every other .agent/ path, an .agent/ directory nested under the units or elsewhere, a reference inside a longer path, such as another directory's .agent folder or a URL, and a reference that climbs out of the units directory are still local task state.
• README states the boundary, and tests cover accepted and rejected paths, references and a pull request range.

Verification

• The test suite, workflow checks and runtime digest check pass locally.
• The policy at this commit passes locally on every member's docs/agent-instructions branch; the previous commit fails on the same branches.

After merging

Member pull requests pin the shared workflows to this branch's commit; they move to the merged commit before they merge.