Why giant AGENTS.md files may be wasting context, hurting maintainability, and making AI-assisted development harder to scale.
A few years ago, for many developers, using AI for software development meant copying a small piece of code into a chat window.
We would ask for a refactoring, copy the response back into the editor, run the tests ourselves, and return to the chat when something failed.
Coding agents changed that workflow.
Tools such as Codex, Claude Code, and others can now explore an entire repository, modify multiple files, execute commands, run tests, and iterate on failures.