posted in Technology
Linux Kernel Developers Consider Adding AGENTS.md To Help Guide AI/LLM Agents
www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Considers-AGENTS-MDposted in Technology
Linux Kernel Developers Consider Adding AGENTS.md To Help Guide AI/LLM Agents
www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Considers-AGENTS-MDReplying to @Mustachius_Grumpius@thelemmy.club
Agents md file doesn’t actually do anything except using more tokens arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11988
Replying to @fullsquare@awful.systems
I feel like you either didn’t read your article or didn’t read the post article
Replying to @brian@programming.dev
To quote the research paper conclusion…
Conclusion We evaluate the impact of context files on coding agent performance for four common coding agents on SWE-BENCH and the novel CTXBENCH, built from recent GitHub issues and less popular repositories containing developer-written context files. We find that all context files consistently increase the cost and number of steps required to complete tasks. LLM-generated context files have a marginal negative effect on task success rates, while developer-written ones provide a marginal performance gain, neither statistically significant. Our trace analyses show that instructions in context files are generally followed and lead to more test- ing and broader exploration; however, they do not function as effective repository overviews. Over- all, our results suggest that context files don’t improve coding agent performance, and should only contain specific additional instructions beyond what is already available in the codebase. This high- lights a concrete gap between current agent-developer recommendations and observed outcomes, and motivates future work on principled ways to automatically generate concise, task-relevant guid- ance for coding agents.
That sounds like “Agents.MD doesn’t work” to me.
Am I missing something?
Replying to @RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zip
your research paper:
llm generated agent.md files are harmful. handwritten ones on average don’t have an effect on ability to complete a task
thread article:
agents keep signing off on commits wrong. we added it to the agents.md and now they don’t
benchmarks notoriously don’t measure the likelihood that the results would be merged by maintainers, just that they passed a test
the old style “repo map” agents.md files that every tool used to create is no longer useful, but of course things that would otherwise be repeated prompts are still good. I cut the ones at work down from hundreds of lines each to tens. without those last few lines the amount of iteration I do - both with agent and when reviewing PRs - goes up significantly