AI coding agents may be getting bad instructions from ‘smelly’ config files (opens in new tab)

AI coding agents are becoming critical to software development, but the configuration files that guide them, such as Agents.md or Claude.md, can be “smelly.” That means they can contain structural flaws, redundancies, or counterproductive workflows that bloat context, waste tokens, and make coding agents less reliable. Researchers from the Department of Computer Science at Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais hope to shed light on this problem, presenting what they call the “first cata...