What do you put in AGENTS.md when a coding task gets messy?

Reddit r/openclaw 06/29/26, 06:04 PM Tools

ai-coding agents-md coding-tasks workflow best-practices handoff debugging

Summary

Discusses how developers using OpenClaw can keep context for AI coding agents by using a handoff document (AGENTS.md) to track goals, files, failures, and decisions in messy coding sessions.

For people using OpenClaw on longer coding tasks: how do you keep the next session grounded when the current one gets messy? I mean the point where the chat has old attempts, half-abandoned ideas, files that changed, and things the agent should not retry. Do you keep a plan.md, git diff, commits, scratchpad, repo notes, or some kind of handoff prompt? The handoff format I keep seeing from other AI coding users is something like: - current goal - files touched - what failed - what is known true - decisions made - what not to touch - next smallest test Curious what OpenClaw users actually do in practice.

Original Article

Similar Articles

Do agents.md files help coding agents?

Hacker News Top

This paper evaluates whether repository-level context files like AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md improve coding agent performance, finding that LLM-generated context files offer little benefit and may reduce efficiency, while developer-written files are better but still not clearly advantageous.

AI coding agents need a company-wide AGENTS.md

Reddit r/AI_Agents

The article proposes that organizations adopting AI coding agents should create a company-wide AGENTS.md file, similar to a human onboarding doc, to standardize agent behavior and context.

@_jaydeepkarale: What AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, and CLAUDE.md do differently, and how to use them without wasting tokens

X AI KOLs Timeline

Explains the differences between AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, and CLAUDE.md for AI coding agents, and offers practical guidance on using them without wasting tokens.

@dair_ai: If you maintain an AGENTS.md or a CLAUDE.md, this is worth a read. (bookmark it) 288 gold-test evaluated runs across Cl…

X AI KOLs Following

This paper presents a controlled ablation study across Claude Code and Codex, 17 real tasks, and 288 runs, finding that context files like AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md do not measurably improve correctness; agents fail on implementation skill, not missing repository knowledge.

Onboard AI agents like you onboard devs