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Do agents.md files help coding agents?

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Re: Do agents.md files help coding agents?

#22

Post by nicolailolansen »

RugnirViking wrote: post #10

yes, they do. I think people overindex on this paper, I remember when it came out we had a lot of discussion in my company about it. But its clear to see they do at least change the agent's behavior, and things like telling it "always use xyz version of java, use gradle to build the project, use this command to run the tests" are really important instead of letting it fumble about trying to find the right thing every…

Yeah. It's very easy to give a definitive "yes", if you've ever worked with coding agents in any capacity. I use them in much the same way as you, there are a bunch of things that would be nice for the agent to know, specifically for me, the project, or how I would like it to run as an example: git or coding review loops ( i use roborev ). Asking the agent to do these things every time, is very time consuming.

Re: Do agents.md files help coding agents?

#23

Post by netdevphoenix »

kandros wrote: post #13

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

>Why not just try and see?

There is a difference between trying something and performing a test whose results are meant to be representative of most setups. A lot of people (in tech surprisingly) who see themselves as practitioners of applied science, apply flawed methodologies and try to generalise the results.

Just because testing is fast, it does not mean that it is free or cheap. Plus time is money and verifying every LLM setup every koolaid dev is proclaiming on bluesky could easily be a full time job.

Re: Do agents.md files help coding agents?

#24

Post by theshrike79 »

sebra wrote: post #11

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,…

Don't describe the code / architecture in AGENTS.md - BUT tell the agent where the documentation for both can be found for each module etc.

This way it can refer to the docs only when relevant instead of dragging around the full knowledge of the front-end structure while it's working on the backend.

Re: Do agents.md files help coding agents?

#28

Post by comboy »

phplovesong wrote: post #21

From my tests agents.md does NOT work with copilot. I have a custom languge and copilot thinks its Rust.

This is relevant to my interests, did you maybe test which models handle custom languages best? It also seems like a good proxy for them being able to stick to important instructions and not being carried away with things that are lookalikes.
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