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Comment by redox99 | Hacker News Reader

AGENTS.md is for that global view.

The 'global view' doc should be in DESIGN.md so that humans know to look for it there, and AGENTS.md should point to it. Similar for other concerns. Unless something really is solely of interest to robots, it shoudn't live directly in AGENTS.md AIUI.

You can't possibly cram everything into AGENTS, also LLMs still do not perfectly give the same weight to all of its context, ie. it still ignores instructions.

Am I stupid or do these agents regularly not read what’s in the agents.md file?

Each agent uses a different file, like claude.md etc (maybe you already knew that).

And it requires a bit of prompt engineering like using caps for some stuff (ALWAYS), etc.

More recent models are better at reading and obeying constraints in AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md.

GPT-5.2-Codex did a bad job of obeying my more detailed AGENTS.md files but GPT-5.3-Codex very evidently follows it well.

Perhaps I’m not using the latest and greatest in terms of models. I tend to avoid using tools that require excessive customization like this.

I find it infinitely frustrating to attempt to make these piece of shit “agents” do basic things like running the unit/integrations tests after making changes.

Opus 4.5 successfully ignored the first line of my CLAUDE.md file last week

Thank god it’s not just me. It really makes me feel insane reading some of the commentary online.

You’re not stupid. But the agents.md file is just an md file at the end of the day.

We’ve been acting as if it’s assembly code that the agents execute without question or confusion, but it’s just some more text.

That’s not what Claude and Codex put there when you ask them to init it. Also, the global view is most definitely bigger than their tiny, loremipsum-on-steroids, context so what do you do then?

You know you can put anything there, not just what they init, right? And you can reference other doc files.

I should probably stop commenting on AI posts because when I try to help others get the most out of agents I usually just get down voted like now. People want to hate on AI, not learn how to use it.

its still not truly global but that seems like a bit pie in the sky.

people still do useful work without a global view, and there's still a human in the loop witth the same ole amount of global view as they ever had.

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