AGENTS.md Research (Gloaguen et al. 2026): LLM-Generated Context Files REDUCE Agent Success Rates and Increase Inference Cost 20%+

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Study across 138 real-world repositories finds that LLM-generated AGENTS.md/context files reduce agent task success rates while increasing inference cost by over 20%. Developer-written context files provide only marginal improvement (+4%) and only when minimal and precise. Counter-intuitive finding that more documentation can harm agent performance — challenges the 'more context is better' assumption.