None of this should be necessary if these tools did what they say on the tin, and most of this advice will probably age like milk.

Write readmes for humans, not LLMs. That's where the ball is going.

Hi, post author here :)

Yes README.md should still be written for humans and isn’t going away anytime soon.

CLAUDE.md is a convention used by claude code, and AGENTS.md is used by other coding agents. Both are intended to be supplemental to the README and are deterministically injected into the agent’s context.

It’s a configuration point for the harness, it’s not intended to replace the README.

Some of the advice in here will undoubtedly age poorly as harnesses change and models improve, but some of the generic principles will stay the same - e.g. that you shouldn’t use an LLM to do a linter &formatter’s job, or that LLMs are stateless and need to be onboarded into the codebase, and having some deterministically-injected instructions to achieve that is useful instead of relying on the agent to non-deterministically derive all that info by reading config and package files

The post isn’t really intended to be super forward-looking as much as “here’s how to use this coding agent harness configuration point as best as we know how to right now”