Comment by mcherm
12 hours ago
You know it because you write the content of AGENTS.md. And if you are smart, you keep it brief and cover only the important things that anyone (human OR LLM) would want to know if working in this directory.
12 hours ago
You know it because you write the content of AGENTS.md. And if you are smart, you keep it brief and cover only the important things that anyone (human OR LLM) would want to know if working in this directory.
As far as I understand even adding relevant information still eventually clouds context
You still need to define assumptions somehow. What you want and what the model wants will not match up by default.
In my experience telling it what I want is not a reliable process at all whatsoever if what I'm asking for is sufficiently complex, no matter what context I provide. So instead I break tasks down into very small parts, ask for solutions to those that I can reasonably quickly assess and then put them together myself. Asking it to do the architectural or deep algorithmic legwork IME wastes so much time and is often just wrong.
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do you just manually type out your important instructions every time instead of being smart and putting a few lines in a text file?
this is probably outdated, attention typically stays fine up to ~200k tokens these days
you end up clouding that more with an agent having to re-understand concepts or conventions
AGENTS.md is good when it is a nested sparknotes for the project, you save context and turns overall, but keep them minimal and largely gotchyas or unusual workflows in your repo