Comment by bisonbear
2 days ago
AGENTS.md is extremely important - it's probably the highest leverage thing you can give your agent. It's injected into every turn, and the agents are trained to follow instructions. If anything, I think people are under-investing into AGENTS.md and going purely based on vibes.
For example, if I write a bad AGENTS.md for a repo with 100 engineers actively working in it, then every agent for every engineer gets worse, without anyone really noticing.
I think we should move towards data-based tuning of AGENTS.md, testing out changes, gathering data, and then making a decision on whether or not to ship it.
The project directory, sure. I'm more of talking about behavior rules here. What are you guys writing, is it effective
My advice, from doing this myself and reading best practices, would be:
- Keep it concise, use progressive disclosure / nested AGENTS.md for information expansion - Give agent the high level repo structure if necessary - Have a "why" section to align the agent, high level, what your code is doing - Keep behavior instructions positive where possible, eg Always clarify intent before acting
cool. I agree with all the front points. The last part ```Keep behavior instructions positive where possible```, do you have good experience on it. I'm only asking since my own experience is they're constantly not followed.
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