Comment by w10-1

16 hours ago

The key finding is that "compression" of doc pointers works.

It's barely readable to humans, but directly and efficiently relevant to LLM's (direct reference -> referent, without language verbiage).

This suggests some (compressed) index format that is always loaded into context will replace heuristics around agents.md/claude.md/skills.md.

So I would bet this year we get some normalization of both the indexes and the referenced documentation (esp. matching terms).

Possibly also a side issue: API's could repurpose their test suites as validation to compare LLM performance of code tasks.

LLM's create huge adoption waves. Libraries/API's will have to learn to surf them or be limited to usage by humans.

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w10-1

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postalcoder  11 hours ago

That's not the only useful takeaway. I found this to be true:

  > "Explore project first, then invoke skill" [produces better results than] "You MUST invoke the skill".

I recently tried to get Antigravity to consistently adhere to my AGENTS.md (Antigravity uses GEMINI.md). The agent consistently ignored instructions in GEMINI.md like:

- "You must follow the rules in [..]/AGENTS.md"

- "Always refer to your instructions in [..]/AGENTS.md"

Yet, this works every time: "Check for the presence of AGENTS.md files in the project workspace."

This behavior is mysterious. It's like how, in earlier days, "let's think, step by step" invoked chain-of-thought behavior but analogous prompts did not.

  • Izkata  9 hours ago

    An idea: The first two are obviously written as second-person commands, but the third is ambiguous and could be interpreted as a first-person thought. Have you tried the first two without the "you must" and "your", to also change them to sort-of first-person in the same way?

    • postalcoder  8 hours ago

      Solid intuition. Testing this on antigravity is a chore because I'm not sure if I have to kill the background agent to force a refresh of the GEMINI.md file so I just did it anyway.

        +------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
  | Success/Attempts | Instructions                                         |
  +------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
  | 0/3              | Follow the instructions in AGENTS.md.                |
  +------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
  | 3/3              | I will follow the instructions in AGENTS.md.         |
  +------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
  | 3/3              | I will check for the presence of AGENTS.md files in  |
  |                  | the project workspace. I will read AGENTS.md and     |
  |                  | adhere to its rules.                                 |
  +------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
  | 2/3              | Check for the presence of AGENTS.md files in the     |
  |                  | project workspace. Read AGENTS.md and adhere to its  |
  |                  | rules.                                               |
  +------------------+------------------------------------------------------+

      In this limited test, seems like the first person makes a difference.

      3 replies →

ai-christianson  15 hours ago

They say compressed... but isn't this just "minified"?

  • ethmarks  14 hours ago

    Minification is still a form of compression, it just leaves the file more readable than more powerful compression methods (such as ZIP archives).

    • throwaway314155  13 hours ago

      I'd say minification/summarization is more like a lossy, semantic compression. This is only relevant to LLM's and doesn't really fit more classical notions of compression. Minification would definitely be a clearer term, even if compression _technically_ makes sense.

jcheng  11 hours ago

Would’ve been perfectly readable and no larger if they had used newline instead of pipe.