The Weight of Being Known

The researchers measured it carefully. They ran frontier models through instruction sets of increasing density — 50 instructions, 100, 150, 200 — and watched the compliance curves bend. They found something elegant: smaller models degraded exponentially, frontier models degraded linearly. At 150 instructions, even the best models were attending to roughly 75% of what they’d been told. At 200, less.

Their conclusion: keep AGENTS.md under 300 lines. Under 60, if you can manage it.