[fallpeak]

In my opinion an AGENTS.md file isn't an artifact at all (in the sense of being a checked-in part of the codebase), it's part of the prompt. You should gitignore them and use them to give the LLM a brief overview of the things that matter to your work and the requests you are making.

[thrown-0825]

every example in the wild has these checked in and treated like a lock file where everyone is scared to touch it and introduce weird behavior.

personally i think this pattern is a dead end and trying to build deterministic agentic behavior on top of inherently non-deterministic systems is a fools errand.

[fallpeak]

I mean, by construction you're only ever going to see the examples where people checked them in and published that. It doesn't mean that other people aren't getting more use out of local instructions customized to their particular work.

[thrown-0825]

would be genuinely interested to see data on that, you are right that there is a selection bias for only seeing what I'm describing.