feat(init): detect agentrc and suggest it in Next Steps

[danielmeppiel]

Why

APM and agentrc are complementary tools: agentrc generates tailored agent instructions from real code analysis, APM distributes and governs them across teams. The agentrc side already bridges to APM — agentrc init detects APM and offers to run apm init (agentrc PR #94, merged).

The reverse bridge is missing. Developers who discover APM first should learn about agentrc at the right moment: when they just initialized a project and have no agent instructions yet.

What

After apm init creates apm.yml, the "Next Steps" panel should contextually suggest agentrc — not as a prompt or subprocess call, but as an informational next step alongside the existing ones.

Behavior matrix

State	What changes
agentrc in PATH + no instructions exist	First next step becomes: Generate agent instructions: agentrc init
agentrc not in PATH + no instructions exist	Tip line after the panel: Tip: use agentrc to generate tailored agent instructions from your codebase. https://github.com/microsoft/agentrc
Instructions already exist (.github/copilot-instructions.md, AGENTS.md, etc.)	No mention — we do not presume how they got there
--yes mode	Next step text included in output (informational, no interaction)

Why "Next Steps" and not a prompt

APM init is fast and deterministic — no LLM calls, no network beyond git config detection. Running agentrc init as a subprocess would take 30-60s (Copilot SDK calls) and break the flow. A next step is a suggestion the user acts on when ready. Same pattern as npm scaffolders printing what to do next.

How

~30 lines in src/apm_cli/commands/init.py:

1. Add detection helper:

import shutil
from pathlib import Path

def _detect_agentrc(project_root: Path) -> tuple[bool, bool]:
    """Returns (agentrc_installed, has_instructions)."""
    installed = shutil.which("agentrc") is not None
    has_instructions = any([
        (project_root / ".github" / "copilot-instructions.md").exists(),
        (project_root / "AGENTS.md").exists(),
        (project_root / ".github" / "instructions").is_dir(),
    ])
    return installed, has_instructions

2. Modify next steps building (around line 134-157) to conditionally prepend the agentrc step.

3. Add tip after the panel when agentrc not installed and no instructions found.

No new dependencies, no prompts, no subprocess calls.

Related

• agentrc epic: microsoft/agentrc#96
• agentrc-side init bridge (merged): microsoft/agentrc#94
• Cross-docs (merged): microsoft/apm#509