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.
Comments
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.