I haven't really extensively evaluated this, but my instinct is to really aggressively trim any 'instructions' files. I try to keep mine at a mid-double-digit linecount and leave out anything that's not critically important. You should also be skeptical of any instructions that basically boil down to "please follow this guideline that's generally accepted to be best practice" - most current models are probably already aware - stick to things that are unique to your project, or value decisions that aren't universally agreed upon.

Wrestled with this a bit. The struggle with this one in particular is its as much for people to read as it is for agents, and the agents are secondary in its case.

I generally agree on this as best practice today, though I think it will become irrelevant in the next 2 generations of models.

Shouldn't all of this be implicit from the codebase? Why do I have to write a file telling it these things?

it’s not that shorter rules are intrinsically better, it’s that longer rules tend to have irrelevant junk in them. ceteris paribus, longer rules are better. it’s just most of the time the longer rules fall under the Blaise Pascal-ian “i regret i didn’t have time to make this shorter”.

AI comments are against the rules. Fuck off, bot.