TL;DR: A good mental model is to treat AGENTS.md as a living list of codebase smells you haven’t fixed yet, not a permanent configuration. Auto-generated AGENTS.md files hurt agent performance and inflate costs by 20%+ because they duplicate what agents can already discover. Human-written files help only when they contain non-discoverable information — tooling gotchas, non-obvious conventions, landmines. Every other line is noise.

There’s a ritual that’s become almost universal among developers a...