Ask HN: Do you still spend time maintaining Claude.md / AGENTS.md files?
4 pointsby david_d89127 hours ago6 comments
  • bisonbear6 hours ago
    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_d89126 hours ago
      The project directory, sure. I'm more of talking about behavior rules here. What are you guys writing, is it effective
      • bisonbear5 hours ago
        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_d89125 hours ago
          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.
          • bisonbear4 hours ago
            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
  • rurban3 hours ago
    Of course. Claude.md is symlinked, and I change it for every new major task. Keeps cost down
  • 6 hours ago
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  • verdverm6 hours ago
    I wrote one yesterday, but what goes in them has changed. Now I only put what amounts to a table of contents and some highlights of important things. Other info goes in other markdown, either localized agents.md or a directory of references. Skills are useful too

    Anthropic has a new post series on enterprise adoption, their first one is on the setup and AGENTS.md gets a good chunk of that

    I now have agents write more of that stuff but deeply review it. As peer commenter points out, a bad instruction can do damage. Keep them lean and clean, adjust them as new models arrive.

  • kcarriedoan hour ago
    [flagged]
  • hieu_dev6 hours ago
    [flagged]