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I use AGENTS.md to make sure my agents loop effectively (tests, quality, etc). Not to describe the code / architecture.
Why not just try and see? The fast feedback loop allow testing all kind of weird theories in a matter of 30m-1h during normal working sessions, most results are obvious
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The referenced paper says No.
You are absolutely right, thank you for pushing back. Upon further examination, I've confirmed that the referenced paper says no. /s
Dunno if there's a way to test that AGENTS.md help the human more than the machine.
Paper was discussed here 4 months ago, and the linked tweet on this post doesn't add any insights and completely misses the huge caveats that come with the found result: the main benefits of using AGENTS.md files are inherently opposed to the characteristics of _median_ "public github project that has an AGENTS.md file".
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034087 Paper was discussed here 4 months ago, and the linked tweet on this post doesn't add any insights and completely misses the huge caveats that come with the found result: the main benefits of using AGENTS.md files are inherently opposed to the characteristics of _median_ "public github project that has an AGENTS.md file".
I think it's useful for people using agent harness to regularly evaluate your skills, agent rules, and memory implementation to ensure there's no conflict across them all. Also, best to rely as little as possible on the agent to write its own agents.md.
It can be be tedious, but that's why agentic coding can still be considered a "skill".
The amount of cargo-culting around AI tooling and practices is so weird to me. Why not just try and see? The fast feedback loop allow testing all kind of weird theories in a matter of 30m-1h during normal working sessions, most results are obvious
The tweet misses the conclusion from the paper that handcrafted AGENTS.md might help. To me its no surprise that 100% vibed AGENTS.md are unproductive. Not reviewing your design docs is probably even worse than not reviewing your code? I've seen some AI-generated agents.md which were just plain wrong. No surprise agents perform worse after reading those. I use AGENTS.md to make sure my agents loop effectively (tests,…
To me it is! I thought if an AGENTS.md is researched with much effort once, next time reading the brief conclusion would save on effort and time and cost. Would have seemed logical to me. Like a glossary, looking up a manual, getting briefed before starting.
But I accept the research findings, and I have even had bad experiences with an outdated AGENTS.md derailing the agent.
So now I'm trying to keep to the basics, e.g. just a sentence or two saying "use bun instead of npm" only because I've had to manually prompt that too many times.
It's remarkable how good agents are at exploring, and at treating relatively sparse code reads and get a good picture nevertheless.