Comment by fwystup

My opinions about the study:

- Don't state the obvious: I wouldn't hand a senior human dev a copy of "Clean Code" before every ticket and expect them to work faster.

- File vs. Prompt is a false dichotomy: The paper treats "Context Files" as a separate entity, but technically, an AGENTS.md is just a system prompt injection. The mechanism is identical. The study isn't proving that "files are bad," it's proving that "context stuffing" is bad. Whether I paste the rules manually or load them via a file, the transformer sees the same tokens.

- Latent vs. Inferable Knowledge: This is the key missing variable. If I remove context files, my agents fail at tasks requiring specific process knowledge - like enforcing strict TDD or using internal wrapper APIs that aren't obvious from public docs. The agent can't "guess" our security protocols or architectural constraints. That's not a performance drag; it's a requirement. The paper seems to conflate "adding noise" with "adding constraints."