When your coding agent doesn’t understand your project, you’ll get junk.

Junk in, junk out.

One of the best ways to get more from agentic coding tools is to give the agent context.

The more an agent understands your project, the better its work will be.

If you ask an agent to add a method to a class, it will. It might read the file. It might infer some structure. But it won’t understand the project's intent.

If you asked a human engineer to make the same change, they would have questions.

What is the purpose of this project? How is it used? What constraints exist?

If they skipped that step, you’d get exactly what you asked for, even if it was wrong.

That’s the same challenge many face with coding agents. A lack of context means it only does what it’s told — which isn’t always what you actually need.

But when it understands a project, it operates with far more clarity.

🧙‍♂️ My “Old School” Method

Before I start serious work with an agent, I have it learn the project.

Read the docs 📚 Review the codebase ⚙️ Understand the architecture 🏙️ Learn how to build, test, and run the project locally 👩‍🔧

I even ask the agent to summarize its understanding back to me.

This started as a saved prompt, turned into a slash command, and is now a skill.

This step is a huge productivity boost.

🤖 Agents Files (AGENTS.md)

Over the past year, an open standard for providing agents with structured context has emerged.

Instead of prompting the agent to rediscover your project every time, document that context once — and the agent will reference it going forward.

Most modern agents support an Agents.md file and reference it during each interaction.

💽 What Goes in an Agents File?

Think of the Agents file as onboarding documentation, but for an agent.

Project context:

• Purpose
• Architecture
• Layout
• CI/CD instructions

Team context:

• Code style preferences
• Testing philosophy (TDD or YOLO)
• Tech stack constraints

Any tribal knowledge you’d expect a new team member to learn belongs in an Agents file.

👨‍💻 Personal Agent Files

Many tools also support a personal Agents file in your home directory.

That’s where your workflow preferences live. Are you a two-space tabs person? Do you want your agent to prefer table tests?

If you have preferences you want to apply to every project, but are unique to you, they go in the personal Agents file.

🧠 Final Thoughts

Using an Agents file dramatically improves agent quality.

Even then, I still use my “learn-this” slash command — sometimes that extra context makes a difference.

If you wouldn’t drop a new engineer into a project without context, don’t do it to your agents.