I’ve noticed something similar with coding agents. Specific rules seem to work better than simply saying “this is for AI.” I wonder if files like AGENTS.md work differently because the tools are designed to read from them first.
Indeed. Another thing worth exploring is how much the position of instructions matter; Claude claims to read docs as a whole unless they're very large, though it might be that it only grabs the first lines of a doc sometimes, in which case there is an "above the fold" effect.