[selridge]

That paper is hard to evaluate because their modal example of a “context file” is a bad practice that arose from early attempts at text-based agent guidance before we recognized that contextual instruction was the aim, not just “context.”

With a “context file” you’re almost guaranteed to add bloat without useful behavior change because it’s just a pre-set list of things that could be good to know about.

So the results of the study don’t generalize to every text file used for instruction or even most.

[tarasyarema]

100%, my tldr from that paper is: never use /init basically

[selridge]

It is WILD how much better things got when I ripped out all the "best practices" from https://agents.md/