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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

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stingraycharles

It is. README is for humans, AGENTS / etc is for LLMs.

Document how to use and install your tool in the readme.

Document how to compile, test, architecture decisions, coding standards, repository structure etc in the agents doc.

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Compile, test, architecture would be very welcome in the readme too Id wager

Where contributors are the audience, yes. For things like libraries, I care about those things only if I run into a bug, and have enough resources to attempt a fix.

It can help even when using the library and not contributing. It helps you to use the api better imo, because usually the abstraction is not perfect and having even a general sense of how the sausage is made will prevent you from falling victim to gotchas. But then on the downside it lowers the mystique of the library. Some coders prefer to be magicians.

Why would these things not be relevant for humans?

They are relevant but dumping it all into one document in the project root isn’t as optimal for humans as it is for agents, especially since a lot of that information is irrelevant to someone landing on your repo, who probably just wants to add it to their dependency manifest or install the app followed by usage instructions geared to humans.

Agents are capable of semantic search and reading an entire directory devoted to human readable docs. So I'm not sure this is a particularly good argument. Just make it clear where to find what.

Because managing an AI’s context is important and you don’t want to put stuff in there that’s not relevant.

Just because they can read it and understand it doesn’t mean there are no better alternatives.

That's also not a strong argument?

Agents often have system prompts specific to their purpose. Having a single dump of agent instructions will increase noise in the context.

We have CONTRIBUTING.md for that. Seems to me the author just doesn't know about it?

There's a lot of shit in my claude.md that would be condescending to a human. Some of it I don't even mean, it's just there to correct egregious patterns the model loves to do. I'm not gonna write "never write fallback code" in my readme, but it saves a lot of time to prevent claude from constantly writing code that would silently fail if it got past me because it contains a fallback path with hardcoded fake data.

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