The first release candidate of systemd 260 arrived in late February with the new mstack feature, dropping System V service scripts support, and other changes. A week after that systemd 260-rc2 released with a few more changes and now another week later is systemd 260-rc3.

Systemd 260-rc3 doesn't bring any major new features at this stage but mostly bug fixes for issues turned up during the release candidate testing the past few weeks.

New in systemd 260-rc3 though is now having a AGENTS.md file in the Git archive for helping out AI agents scraping the systemd code. The AGENTS.md documentation for AI coding agents guide them on the systemd architecture, development workflow, systemd's coding style, and systemd contribution guidelines. Plus help in running various systemd commands and integration testing. Plus noting that systemd contributions do require AI disclosures akin to the "Co-developed-by" tag on patches. AGENTS.md is also cited in a new CLAUDE.md file as a helper for Claude Code.

Also new for helping AI Agents in systemd 260 is adding the claude-review.yml file as the YAML file outlining the reviewing of systemd pull requests with Claude Code as the AI assistant.

More details on the systemd 260-rc3 changes can be found via GitHub.