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Do Coding Agents Follow AGENTS.md? The Effect of Policy Wording on Instruction Compliance

arXiv Software Engineering · WORLD · Compilers · 11/4/2026, 12:00:00 AM

arXiv:2611.04367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coding agents do not always follow the policies in an Agent Context File (ACF). We inserted one policy, in four styles, into the ACFs of 86 benchmark tasks across four harness-model combinations. Conditional phrasing was followed less often than Prescriptive and Explanatory. The better of those two varied by combination.

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