Despite widespread industry recommendations, a new ETH Zurich paper concludes that AGENTS.md files may often hinder AI coding agents. The researchers recommend omitting LLM-generated context files entirely and limiting human-written instructions to non-inferable details, such as highly specific tooling or custom build commands.

The team (Thibaud Gloaguen, Niels Mündler, Mark Müller, Veselin Raychev, Martin Vechev) justified the research by noting that while 60,000 open-source repositories currently contain context files such as AGENTS.md, and many agent frameworks feature built-in commands to auto-generate them, there has been no rigorous empirical investigation into whether these files actually improve an AI agent’s ability to resolve real-world coding tasks.

www.infoq.com, in "New Research Reassesses the Value of AGENTS.md Files for AI Coding - InfoQ"

Let's see when all skills are obsolete as well.