[danielmeppiel]

The trace analysis is the most interesting part of this paper.

Agents dutifully follow AGENTS.md instructions — they run more tests, grep more files, do more checks — but that thoroughness costs 19% more inference without meaningfully improving outcomes. That's not an argument against context files, it's evidence we're writing them wrong.

We're authoring them like READMEs for humans ("here's the architecture, here's how we structure things") when agents actually need narrow, non-inferable directives — the custom build flag, the weird test harness, the constraint they'd waste 30 tool calls discovering.

The HN commenter who noted the real value is "forcing you to articulate things previously just in your head" is actually pointing at the same conclusion from the other direction: the thinking matters, but the artifact needs a different shape than what we've converged on.