alt Hacker News> it's not magic and you need to make the job of the agent easier by giving it good instructions, tools, and environments.
This. We had much better success by letting the agent pull context rather trying to push what we thought was relevant.
Turns out it's exactly like a human: if you push the wrong context, it'll influence them to follow the wrong pattern.
I'd put it somewhere in the middle, but closer to the pull end.
- I force the AGENTS.md into the system prompt if the agent reads a directory, or file within, that contains one such file. This is anecdotally very good and saves on function calls and context growth in multiple ways. Sort them. I'm now doing this with planning and long-term task tracking markdown files.
- Everything else is pull, ideally be search, yet to substantially leverage subagents for context gathering. Savings elsewhere have pushed the need out.
btw, hi Al, I see you are working on a new company since our last collaboration, want to catch up sometime and talk shop?