Your AGENTS.md Is Already Stale — And Your Agent Trusts It Completely
7.4 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth 7
novelty 8
actionability 8
community 6
strategic 5
personal 10
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Stale AGENTS.md problem is a fresh insight directly impacting AI agent documentation practices.
Summary
Stale AGENTS.md files are more dangerous than stale READMEs because coding agents obey them with full confidence, executing wrong build commands or skipping guardrails. The fix is to write every line as a verifiable fact—a real command, file, or constraint—and update the file in the same PR as code changes. Auto-generated instruction files actually reduce task success by padding with plausible-but-wrong requirements that agents over-obey.