HACKER Q&A
📣 david_d8912

Do you still spend time maintaining Claude.md / AGENTS.md files?


For people using coding agents regularly: do you still invest time in repo-level instruction files like CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, etc.?

It's not a surprise that you don't expect the rules there to be followed even with less than 100 lines of changes. Yet still see folks like Karpathy post rules around with hundreds of stars.

Tell me if you're still spending the effort of trying claude.md, and are they effective, what're you writing in it.

Update: I'm more of talking about behavior rules here (coding standard, comment style, Do this and Don't do that, etc.). For facts like project directories, important doc ref, commands, sure that always helps.

  👤 bisonbear Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 verdverm
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.

👤 rurban
Of course. Claude.md is symlinked, and I change it for every new major task. Keeps cost down