Working with an AI assistant
Giving an assistant like ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot the context to change your site well.
AI assistants are good at the small tasks a site needs: a CSS change, a shortcode, a workflow fix. They do better with the right context, because what they learned about Hugo and this theme may be out of date.
Give it these docs. They’re available as plain text for exactly this:
llms.txt lists every page, and
llms-full.txt has all of them in one file, to attach or
paste. Each page also has a Markdown version: add index.md to its address.
Leave instructions in your site. Coding assistants read a file named AGENTS.md at the top of your repository
(Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md). A few lines save explaining the same things every time:
# My site
A Hugo site with the Fieldnotes theme (a Hugo module: github.com/maxfettinger/fieldnotes).
Docs for the theme: https://fieldnotes.maxfettinger.com/docs/llms-full.txt
- Don't edit the theme. Change the look in assets/css/custom.css and hugo.toml; override templates by copying
them to the same path in layouts/.
- Templates use Hugo 0.146+ names: layouts/_partials/, _shortcodes/, _markup/. Read Hugo's current docs
(https://gohugo.io/documentation/) before writing template code.
- Check every change with `hugo server` and `hugo --printPathWarnings`.
- Never commit .env or put the MapTiler key in a file; it comes from HUGO_MAPTILER_KEY.Review what it changes. Run hugo server and look at the result, in light and dark mode and on a phone-sized
window, before you commit. Keep secrets like your MapTiler key out of the chat.