[bisonbear]

AGENTS.md is extremely important - it's probably the highest leverage thing you can give your agent. It's injected into every turn, and the agents are trained to follow instructions. If anything, I think people are under-investing into AGENTS.md and going purely based on vibes.

For example, if I write a bad AGENTS.md for a repo with 100 engineers actively working in it, then every agent for every engineer gets worse, without anyone really noticing.

I think we should move towards data-based tuning of AGENTS.md, testing out changes, gathering data, and then making a decision on whether or not to ship it.

[david_d8912]

The project directory, sure. I'm more of talking about behavior rules here. What are you guys writing, is it effective

[bisonbear]

My advice, from doing this myself and reading best practices, would be:

- Keep it concise, use progressive disclosure / nested AGENTS.md for information expansion - Give agent the high level repo structure if necessary - Have a "why" section to align the agent, high level, what your code is doing - Keep behavior instructions positive where possible, eg Always clarify intent before acting

[david_d8912]

cool. I agree with all the front points. The last part ```Keep behavior instructions positive where possible```, do you have good experience on it. I'm only asking since my own experience is they're constantly not followed.

[bisonbear]

Yeah, I've found that to be more effective. Going with the example "Always clarify intent before acting" > "Never act without getting intent first", seemingly because telling the agent NOT to do something sometimes primes it to do that exact thing