You can't possibly cram everything into AGENTS, also LLMs still do not perfectly give the same weight to all of its context, ie. it still ignores instructions.

The 'global view' doc should be in DESIGN.md so that humans know to look for it there, and AGENTS.md should point to it. Similar for other concerns. Unless something really is solely of interest to robots, it shoudn't live directly in AGENTS.md AIUI.

Am I stupid or do these agents regularly not read what’s in the agents.md file?

That’s not what Claude and Codex put there when you ask them to init it. Also, the global view is most definitely bigger than their tiny, loremipsum-on-steroids, context so what do you do then?

its still not truly global but that seems like a bit pie in the sky.

people still do useful work without a global view, and there's still a human in the loop witth the same ole amount of global view as they ever had.