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Comment by YuechenLi

1 day ago

I thought the agents are mostly self-documenting since they usually write just as much Markdown documentation autonomously as they do code/unit tests, not sure why they would need extra tools here.

The markdown files, documentation, decision files, (3rd party)memory systems, etc. are all a waste of time and context.

Every single project at work that has documentation/ADRs/etc ends up stale as fuck and it pollutes context more than it helps. Even the agent generated docs. Hell, especially the agent generated docs. It's like the LLMs can't just DELETE something, they always amend. So now there's stale details in there about something we abandoned polluting context.

The code is the documentation, none of this stuff is needed. I'm seeing WAY too many devs/engineers go down the rabbit hole of trying to build these tools and systems but not actually getting meaningful work done.

I've been doing my best to remove and delete all the documentation. I usually keep a super high level AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md file and that's it. The llm/agent can figure it out. You might argue I waste 5 minutes and a dollar or two for the agent to "figure it out" each time, but I'm pretty certain people are wasting FAR more time and money building these things out and maintaining them in each of their projects (or NOT maintaining them and they're actively BAD for their projects).

Because of old outdated info that gets left behind, causing confusion for future agents.

  • You can tell it to update the docs to be consistent with whatever changed in the code (or whatever is is the authoritative product form). After a while it usually gets with the program and updates the docs automatically. But not always.

You don't. But as was ever the case before AI most humans don't know to or want to have documentation written. So the tools have workarounds to try to reduce the number of "AI sucks because I told it X and it did Y" posts.