Hono for Coding Agents

Hono is a good fit for coding agents. The API is small and built on Web Standards, so an agent already knows most of it. This page lists what we provide so that agents work well with Hono.

Getting started

Create a project, then run your agent in it.

npm create hono@next my-app

The templates come with what an agent needs: an AGENTS.md that tells the agent how to check the app, and Hono CLI as a dev dependency. Nothing else to set up.

Documentation for agents

Every page on this site is available as Markdown. Fetch it with the Accept: text/markdown header:

curl -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://hono.dev/docs/api/routing

To find the right page, start from /llms.txt. It lists every page with a one-line description. /llms-full.txt has the whole documentation in one file, and /llms-small.txt is a shorter version.

Hono Skills

Hono Skills are Agent Skills for Hono. The hono skill gives an agent an inline API reference and the way to test requests with Hono CLI. The hono-jsx skill covers UI with hono/jsx.

Install them with skills.sh or GitHub CLI. Both put the skills where your agent reads them.

# skills.sh
npx skills add honojs/skills

# GitHub CLI
gh skill install honojs/skills hono
gh skill install honojs/skills hono-jsx

Hono CLI

Hono CLI loads your app directly, so an agent can inspect and test it without starting a server. Every command prints JSON.

hono routes          # all routes, without reading the source
hono request /users  # one request, through app.request()
hono batch -         # many requests with expectations, until "failed": 0
hono snapshot        # the current behavior, as batch lines

hono --help starts with a note for the agent, and hono <command> --help has examples. No other setup.

AGENTS.md

Agents follow the way your project says to run and check things. One line in AGENTS.md is enough to make them use Hono CLI instead of a dev server. The agent learns the rest from hono --help. The create-hono templates already have it.

## Hono CLI

Run `npx hono --help` first, and use the CLI instead of a dev server.

Or say it to the agent directly. The same line works as a prompt.

How well do agents use Hono?

We measure it. See Agent DX for the results.