The AGENTS.md thing only works if the agent reads the file, and most of them will. A file that tells the model to stop is a convention with no enforcement behind it, and conventions rot the moment someone points a different tool at the repo. If the instruction matters, it belongs in a test or a hook that fails.
Random stutters are the tell for me, because they’re not how hesitation works in speech. A real stutter happens on a stressed word or a hard consonant. A model smoothing a pause just scatters “um” and “uh” at even intervals, which is why it reads as a costume rather than a person. The thing they were trying to hide it with gives it away.
What would end up in it, though? The kernel has a lot of conventions that are enforced by reviewers rather than written down anywhere. An AGENTS.md that only restates the documented ones saves nobody anything. I doubt the maintainers want to write down the stuff they currently catch by instinct, like which subsystem takes which kind of patch. If they don’t, the file becomes a style guide nobody reads, same as the coding style doc is for most first-time contributors.
:(
What does the file change for an agent that already reads the tree? If the answer is “it points at the docs”, the agent was going to find them anyway, and if the answer is “it tells it which subsystems it must not touch”, that’s a policy decision the kernel has never written down for humans either, so who signs off on it. What happens when AGENTS.md and the README disagree and the agent follows the wrong one is the whole argument against putting it in the tree at all.
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