"Your AGENTS.md Is a Liability" — The Instruction Compliance Crisis

The most immediately actionable finding of the day. Five compounding attention mechanisms make bloated configuration files harmful: Lost in the Middle (mid-context neglect), attention sinks (first tokens get disproportionate weight), softmax dilution (more tokens = less per-token attention), context rot (degradation over long contexts), and the "dumb zone" past 40% of context capacity. Reasoning models maintain near-perfect performance through 100-250 instructions before threshold collapse; non-reasoning models decay exponentially from instruction one. Action items: Audit your CLAUDE.md — if it exceeds 100 lines, prune aggressively. Move your 5 most critical rules to lines 1-10 AND duplicate them at the end. Use positive framing ("Always do Y") over negative ("Never do X"). Move domain rules into module-level files loaded on demand. paddo.dev