> I would love to figure out how to stop that from happening automatically.

AGENTS.md

> AGENTS.md

-- which will be ignored just often enough that you can never quite trust it.

Yup. No matter how much you tell it to keep things simple, modular, crisp, whatever, it generates tons of garbage much too often.

Btw it may be obvious but afaik claude by default only reads CLAUDE.md and not AGENTS.md

And yet still less often than the average developer.

I think the issue is deeper than prompts, agents.md, smart flows, etc. I think the problem is that LLMs are searchers, trained on preferring some results. So, if the dumb solution is there, and the smart solution is not there, they won't spit it out.