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

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.

arXiv comment4 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables. (c) IEICE. This paper has been submitted to IEICE and is currently under review