Regarding the 4% improvement for human written AGENTS.md: this would be huge indeed if it were a _consistent_ improvement. However, for example on Sonnet 4.5, performance _drops_ by over 2%. Qwen3 benefits most and GPT-5.2 improves by 1-2%.
The LLM-generated prompts follow the coding agent recommendations. We also show an ablation over different prompt types, and none have consistently better performance.
But ultimately I agree with your post. In fact we do recommend writing good AGENTS.md, manually and targetedly. This is emphasized for example at the end of our abstract and conclusion.
Regarding the 4% improvement for human written AGENTS.md: this would be huge indeed if it were a _consistent_ improvement. However, for example on Sonnet 4.5, performance _drops_ by over 2%. Qwen3 benefits most and GPT-5.2 improves by 1-2%.
The LLM-generated prompts follow the coding agent recommendations. We also show an ablation over different prompt types, and none have consistently better performance.
But ultimately I agree with your post. In fact we do recommend writing good AGENTS.md, manually and targetedly. This is emphasized for example at the end of our abstract and conclusion.