Yeah I had one trying to start an initiative to add them and when I asked how they know if they’re doing anything he was completely at a loss for words. It is just cargo cult mentality.
This is a load of shit. AGENTS.md is just a rules file for a repo like anything else. Properly-written rules files give good direction into how to interact with a project. If you don’t think it’s being read, ask the agent, and figure out why.
Far too many of these LLM articles are:
I did the thing
The thing didn’t work for me
Pretend it’s a hyper-scientific experiment and write an article about it
Declare X is shit because my version of X is shit, or because most people don’t know how to make X.
You don’t do the thing and pretend the first draft is going to work perfectly. You iterate, ask the agent directly why it didn’t work or what kind of improvements could be made, and improve the process.
Most of the time when I’m running through a repetitive process with a skill, I ask, “hey, what pitfalls did we learn from this process and how can we improve this skill?” Boom, iteration.
Also, Pivot-to-AI is just some guy’s anti-AI blog site. He does the same shit on YouTube.
It’s literally researchers doing research which the blog links to. Most of the AI booster stuff is completely unsubstantiated, and it turns out when you measure things they are often full of shit.
Bad research is still bad. The main paper is 9 pages with wide margins, outside of references. This was a few college students publishing their CS research assignment. The “Limitations” section is rather telling:
Another interesting avenue opened by this work is how to improve the automatic generation of useful context files.
Okay, so they already admitted that they started with useless context files, which sabotages their own test.
You know how you fix useless context files? You iterate until they are useful context files!
This whole research paper is XKCD 385, except with AGENTS.md files.
That blog post is based on a study that also said:
We conclude that while context files are useful for specifying non-standard coding practices, any attempts to improve performance should be rigorously evaluated before deployment
The kernel project has some particular conventions and workflows, so I think in this case it may make sense.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/08/27/your-agents-md-file-doesnt-actually-do-anything/
Coworkers have been adding these to our projects and I have noticed no difference in the usefullness of LLMs, so I suppose it’s nice to be validated.
Yeah I had one trying to start an initiative to add them and when I asked how they know if they’re doing anything he was completely at a loss for words. It is just cargo cult mentality.
This is a load of shit.
AGENTS.mdis just a rules file for a repo like anything else. Properly-written rules files give good direction into how to interact with a project. If you don’t think it’s being read, ask the agent, and figure out why.Far too many of these LLM articles are:
You don’t do the thing and pretend the first draft is going to work perfectly. You iterate, ask the agent directly why it didn’t work or what kind of improvements could be made, and improve the process.
Most of the time when I’m running through a repetitive process with a skill, I ask, “hey, what pitfalls did we learn from this process and how can we improve this skill?” Boom, iteration.
Also, Pivot-to-AI is just some guy’s anti-AI blog site. He does the same shit on YouTube.
It’s literally researchers doing research which the blog links to. Most of the AI booster stuff is completely unsubstantiated, and it turns out when you measure things they are often full of shit.
Bad research is still bad. The main paper is 9 pages with wide margins, outside of references. This was a few college students publishing their CS research assignment. The “Limitations” section is rather telling:
Okay, so they already admitted that they started with useless context files, which sabotages their own test.
You know how you fix useless context files? You iterate until they are useful context files!
This whole research paper is XKCD 385, except with
AGENTS.mdfiles.Ai is shit because of the people behind it, and because of the crypto bro mentality of its users.
That blog post is based on a study that also said:
The kernel project has some particular conventions and workflows, so I think in this case it may make sense.
They found it mostly just increases token spend.