[sdenton4]

Eh, even for a senior engineer, dropping into a new codebase is greatly helped by an orientation from someone who works on the code. What's where, common gotchas, which tests really matter, and so on. The agents file serves a similar role.

[fennecbutt]

Yup, readmes exist for a reason even for meat bags

[derefr]

Except that most READMEs are seemingly written more for end-users than for developers; and even CONTRIBUTING files often mostly just document the social contribution process + guidelines rather than providing any guidance targeted toward those who would contribute. There’s a lot of “top-level architectural assumptions” detail in particular that is left on the floor, documented nowhere. Which “works” when you expect human devs to “stare really hard and ask questions” until they figure out what’s being done differently in this codebase; but doesn’t work at all when an LLM with zero permanent learning capability gets involved.