That paper is hard to evaluate because their modal example of a “context file” is a bad practice that arose from early attempts at text-based agent guidance before we recognized that contextual instruction was the aim, not just “context.”
With a “context file” you’re almost guaranteed to add bloat without useful behavior change because it’s just a pre-set list of things that could be good to know about.
So the results of the study don’t generalize to every text file used for instruction or even most.
Comments
That paper is hard to evaluate because their modal example of a “context file” is a bad practice that arose from early attempts at text-based agent guidance before we recognized that contextual instruction was the aim, not just “context.”
With a “context file” you’re almost guaranteed to add bloat without useful behavior change because it’s just a pre-set list of things that could be good to know about.
So the results of the study don’t generalize to every text file used for instruction or even most.
100%, my tldr from that paper is: never use /init basically
It is WILD how much better things got when I ripped out all the "best practices" from https://agents.md/