david_d8912

For people using coding agents regularly: do you still invest time in user-level and repo-level instruction files like CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, etc.?

It's not a surprise that you don't expect the rules there to be followed even with less than 100 lines of changes. Yet still see folks like Karpathy post rules around with hundreds of stars.

Tell me if you're still spending the effort of trying claude.md, and are they effective, what're you writing in it.

Update: I'm more of talking about behavior rules here (coding standard, comment style, Do this and Don't do that, etc.). For facts like project directories, important doc ref, commands, sure that always helps.

I'm using both claude code (opus-4.7) and codex (gpt-5.5). The agents are perfectly capable of delivering most features hands free these days, but the code quality is still miserable without another few rounds of prompt. And it's worse for personal vibe project without well-written history code files.

Simple example would be a poor extension of existing util methods, agent always duplicate and create new method instead of think about gracefully extending existing methods.

How are you guys solving this issue? A carefully maintained claude.md imo is only a mitigation, not a scalable solution.