I understand what you're railing against in general: engineers who make these big memory/doc systems that quickly go stale and are at best useless and at worst actively harmful. Even more insidiously, these engineers are blind to this fact because maybe some of this stuff was effective 6-12 months ago and they haven't reassessed their workflows. Now that's dogma. We really do agree on that.

However. At least in the projects I've worked on, it's trivial to read the transcripts and notice that without enough direction, there are certain things the agents will burn lots of tokens to rediscover in every session. That's absolutely not dogma.

I think there's a balance between the tokens burned up rediscovering things vs tokens being used keeping docs/decisions/skills/etc.

And I think a lot of places are burning way more on the latter than the former. I think the former is more cost effective due to caching as well. So I HEAVILY lean towards the former especially with how effective I think it is these days.

    I think there's a balance between the tokens 
    burned up rediscovering things vs tokens being 
    used keeping docs/decisions/skills/etc.

This mystical balance isn't difficult to measure. You don't have to believe anybody; just read the darn session transcripts. It's going to take at least one (but usually multiple) turns of grepping or other exploration to rediscover a thing. How many tokens does this add to your context? Since 1 token = ~4 characters you can count characters in your text editor.

Is this less, or greater than the number of tokens it would cost to simply add that thing to AGENTS.md?

If you're burning 5000 tokens to rediscover the same thing in every session, and it would take only 500 tokens to just put the thing in your AGENTS.md, it's an easy decision. Do you understand that paying 500 tokens in every session is less than paying 5000 tokens in every session?

If you're burning 5000 tokens to rediscover the same thing in 50% of your sessions, it's probably still worth it, but now you might consider placing it into a skill so that it only gets loaded into the 50% of sessions that need it.

If you're burning 5000 tokens to rediscover the same thing in 1% of your sessions then yeah, definitely skill. (You can add it to your prompts manually too, of course, but that is functionally equivalent to adding it to a skill that is set to manual invocation only...)

    So I HEAVILY lean towards the former especially with 
    how effective I think it is these days.

How is this different from what I already said at the beginning of this conversation, where I recommended beginning with minimal (or no) skills or instructions... and then judiciously adding very lean ones based on actual observations? You claimed that this was a waste of time.

See here's the thing, you're pulling these numbers out of your ass when I'm making these recommendations from my observations that it's basically a wash and you get better results just having the agent read the code.

You aren't putting into 500 tokens what takes 5k tokens to discover. I've found that when I had these larger markdown files with all the details the models STILL went to the code to review. Then the markdown files get stale in spots, NO MATTER WHAT. Not only stale, but if you're having agents maintain these files they WILL hallucinate or input superfluous or unnecessary info. Now that I have short markdown files (or none in some instances) the agent just looks at the code and it's pretty simple to figure out.

And yes, I think most of the skills are a waste of time. You're just creating more shit to maintain. The most usable and reusable skills end up being short and concise, to where you could just type them into the prompt in any number of ways adhoc... effectively making the skill mostly worthless. The big skills end up being too much and less effective ime. And it can be difficult to rely on agents to invoke skills or the right skills.

If my skills need maintenance and hand holding, what am I really gaining?

Pulled out of my ass? Excuse you?

As I optimistically hope you may be able to eventually understand with what I assume to be significant effort on your part[1], the numbers are going to be different on a case by case basis. Thus, my generalization.

This conversation is over, as you have been moving goalposts in various random directions: careening between "no directions for LLMs!" and then talking about your "minimal" AGENTS.md and markdown files, and then disagreeing with me for having minimal AGENTS.md and markdown files, in favor of your approach which involves... minimal AGENTS.md and markdown files, apparently. Luckily, it all sounds so schizo that at least nobody will take you seriously enough to follow your bad advice. It's exhausting talking to you, but surely not as exhausting as being you, so I do still have sympathy. Good luck.

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[1] remember to hydrate, a good night's sleep helps too

Just fyi, you're the only one that said "no direction for LLMs"

The condescending attitude isn't a great look, especially when you're making up strawmen arguments.