Comment by simonw
7 days ago
> Your carefully curated AGENTS.md is only really useful at the very beginning of the conversation, but the longer the conversation gets, the less important those tokens on the top are.
If that's genuinely causing you problems you can restart your session frequently to avoid the context rot.
Come on, let's not pretend 100k tokens is something I need to spend hours to reach for your helpful advice to be even remotely valid, it's something even the most basic problems struggle to fit into.
For the fun of it I just started a new conversation with Sonnet 4, passed it one 550 lines long file (25 kilobytes) and my AGENTS.md (<200 lines, 8 kilobytes) and my only instructions were to "do nothing". It spat out exactly 100 words describing my file without modifying anything and that's already almost a fifth of my context window gone (18k tokens to be exact).
I then asked it to re-write a part of it to "make it look better" (184 lines added, 112 lines deleted according to git) and I'm already at 33k before I got to review a single line. Heaven forbid I need to build on top of that change in a different file, because by then my AGENTS.md might as well not exist!
Thanks for bringing numbers. I realize now I've not actually done much customization of AGENTS.md myself yet, so maybe I'll start seeing the problems you're describing more as I iterate on my own custom files.