yes, they do. I think people overindex on this paper, I remember when it came out we had a lot of discussion in my company about it. But its clear to see they do at least change the agent's behavior, and things like telling it "always use xyz version of java, use gradle to build the project, use this command to run the tests" are really important instead of letting it fumble about trying to find the right thing every time you ask it anything

I think the problem some people fall into, and especially LLM authored ones (which is where they see the documents not helping here) is instead describing the code, or the structure of the code. Which I don't think helps much - the agent can already see you have 4 modules called a b c and d, and can read the readmes inside of them just fine if it has questions.

One more marginal thing I find helpful but im less sure has positive impact is describing the right terminology for the agent so it can be smarter at communicating with the developer. Things like different names for the product, products it interfaces with, resource names in infra, terms from the customer and product team. I don't think it helps the agent code (much) but it does help communication if it knows what we mean when we speak (and naming things is, as we know, one of the hard problems in CS)

Overall, most of my agents.md now are a list of useful bash commands for working and testing with the project & tests. (heres how to spin up docker services, heres how to update the libraries, heres how to run a command against the local db, heres how to insert a document to be run etc)

and then at the end a terminology blob, which I find myself referencing too.

Yeah. It's very easy to give a definitive "yes", if you've ever worked with coding agents in any capacity. I use them in much the same way as you, there are a bunch of things that would be nice for the agent to know, specifically for me, the project, or how I would like it to run as an example: git or coding review loops ( i use roborev ). Asking the agent to do these things every time, is very time consuming.