Comment by spawarotti
4 days ago
At this point AGENTS.md is a README.md with enough hype behind it to actually motivate people to populate it with contents. People were too lazy to write docs for other people, but funnily enough are ok with doing it for robots.
This situation reminds me a bit of ergonomic handles design. Designed for a few people, preferred by everyone.
I think it’s the reverse - people were too lazy to read the docs so nobody was motivated to write them.
With an agent I know if I write once to CLAUDE.md and it will be read by 1000’s of agents in a week.
I like this insight. We kind of always knew that we wanted good docs, but they're demotivating to maintain if people aren't reading them. LLMs by their nature won't be onboarded to the codebase with meetings and conversations, so if we want them to have a proper onboarding then we're forced to be less lazy with our docs, and we get the validation of knowing they're being used.
I still don't get why it can't be just README.md. Just make sure it's minimal bullshit inside.
I mean the agents are to lazy to read any of this anyway and often will forget the sort of instructions being spam these with after 3 more instructions too.
The difference now is that people are actively trying to remove people (others and themselves) from software development work, so the robots have to have adequate instructions. The motivation is bigger. To dismantle all human involvement with software development is something that everyone wants, and they want it yesterday.
everyone? source?
It's sort of obvious. Humans cost more money than coding agents. The more you can have a coding agent do, the less you have to pay a human to do.
This aligns pretty clearly with the profit motive of most companies.