Comment by deaux
3 hours ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034087
Paper was discussed here 4 months ago, and the linked tweet on this post doesn't add any insights and completely misses the huge caveats that come with the found result: the main benefits of using AGENTS.md files are inherently opposed to the characteristics of _median_ "public github project that has an AGENTS.md file".
Yeah it was a good discussion. I'm definitely on the side of "a well written agents.md is very good for the agent". The file should not be static. The agents.md from a year ago is not the right agents.md for today. Many of them are overly long, overly instructive, and include a lot of unccessary code bits.
I think it's useful for people using agent harness to regularly evaluate your skills, agent rules, and memory implementation to ensure there's no conflict across them all. Also, best to rely as little as possible on the agent to write its own agents.md.
It can be be tedious, but that's why agentic coding can still be considered a "skill".
> "a well written agents.md is very good for the agent"
while even a mildly bad agents.md can be _very_ bad for the agent. they rot very quickly which is why human curation is essential.
same with memory - a lot of the self-learning tools that are becoming popular now degrade agents over time - which is why you end up being able to run an eval with no context and it performs better
> but that's why agentic coding can still be considered a "skill".
yes - far too many cases of throwing a kitchen sink of prompts, skills, tools etc. thinking the llm will sort it out. you need to constantly prune, eval, tweak, observe, update etc. in a loop