AI RESEARCH
On the Impact of AGENTS.md Files on the Efficiency of AI Coding Agents
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2601.20404v2 Announce Type: replace-cross AI coding agents such as Codex and Claude Code are increasingly used to autonomously contribute to software repositories. However, little is known about how repository-level configuration artifacts affect operational efficiency of the agents. In this paper, we study the impact of AGENTS$.$md files on the runtime and token consumption of AI coding agents operating on GitHub pull requests. We analyze 10 repositories and 124 pull requests, executing agents under two conditions: with and without an AGENTS$.$md file.