How do we want to standardize our root-level documentation across (public) repos

Very useful discussion thread with @mbarlow12 can be found here

In particular, with the rise of LLM-enhanced software development, especially in the open-source world, more and more of the .md documentation is meant to target (and improve) the results of tools like Claude.

At the same time, we still want documentation such as CONTRIBUTING.md, HACKING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md that is human-friendly and not overloaded with information.

This ticket serves as a discussion platform for determining the appropriate standard .md files to be found at the root-level of any given repo, and if it serves to have any additional separation for more comprehensive documentation targetting the robots

Start with the linked pull-request review discussion and inspect the root-level documentation files named in the issue, including CONTRIBUTING.md, HACKING.md, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md. Compare their human-facing purpose with the proposed documentation for tooling, then document an agreed standard for which files belong at repository root and where more comprehensive guidance should live.