Cleaning up AGENTS.md and Skills: why stale guardrails now hurt strong coding agents
xiaohu · x · 2026-09-14
- A Chinese blog's annotated read of an OpenAI Developers guide on reworking coding agent configs: as models get dramatically stronger, the old "babysitter-style" rule stacks written for weak models become a liability—wasting context, causing wrong-skill picks, and making highly-aligned models stall for confirmation on safe operations.
- The proposed four-step cleanup: tighten skill descriptions (too many skills truncate summaries, causing misselection); turn AGENTS.md from mandatory full-read into an on-demand index; explicitly grant permissions in safe environments instead of blanket warnings; bake completion criteria into task prompts to close the loop.
- Caveat: the source is paywalled, so only the first steps' rationale is visible; the "GPT-6 Astra" framing is unverified.
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