Repo hygiene: AGENTS.md, copilot-instructions, and deploy/ contributor guidance

[devantler]

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Problem

This repo lacks the agent / instruction files the rest of the portfolio standardizes on, and its contributor docs don't cover the Crossplane workflow:

• No AGENTS.md (and therefore no ## Maintenance section for the daily engineer).
• No .github/copilot-instructions.md — what Copilot code review actually reads; every other portfolio repo carries one.
• CONTRIBUTING.md documents the generic fork→PR flow but says nothing about authoring deploy/ CRs (Observe-first adoption, external-name annotations, management-policy-except-Delete, the shared kustomize patch).
• deploy/README.md omits a phase roadmap and the credential-refresh / vault-unreachable behavior (external-secret.yaml refreshInterval: 1h).

Proposed direction

• Add AGENTS.md (canonical, cross-tool) with a ## Maintenance section + the CLAUDE.md / GEMINI.md shims.
• Add a concise, review-focused .github/copilot-instructions.md (≤4000 chars; the monorepo's file is the exemplar) covering the Crossplane authoring patterns.
• Add a "Contributing to declarative state" section to CONTRIBUTING.md, and a phase-roadmap + credential-refresh note to deploy/README.md.

Rough size

S–M — docs / agent-files; can ship incrementally (copilot-instructions + AGENTS.md first).

[devantler]

🤖 Generated by the Daily AI Assistant

Shipped draft #59 addressing this. One scope note that revises this issue's premise:

• AGENTS.md — added (with a ## Maintenance card + the declarative/Observe-first/teams-over-individuals golden rules). ✅
• .github/copilot-instructions.md — won't-add. The root contract retired the separate Copilot-review file org-wide on 2026-06-18 (Copilot code review reads AGENTS.md directly), so a parallel file is now redundant rather than missing.
• CONTRIBUTING.md deploy/ guidance — not added to .github/CONTRIBUTING.md, because that file is the org-wide default community-health file rendered for every repo; the Crossplane authoring workflow lives in the new AGENTS.md (canonical) + the existing deploy/README.md instead.

So #59 closes the real intent of this issue. Bullets 2 and 3 are intentionally resolved as won't-do-here for the reasons above.