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Treat a project's own agent instructions as information (for discussion) - #53
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Projects are starting to ship instructions for their own coding agents (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .claude/, .cursor/). They are written for everyday work on the project, and some contradict what a migration must do. The skill says nothing about them, so whether an agent follows such a directive, ignores it, or sets it aside and says so is left to chance. Observed in any2bazel-lab: YugabyteDB ships a src/AGENTS.md saying to use only its build script and never to run cmake or test binaries directly. That is exactly the information a migration needs (the script sets up what the build depends on), phrased as a prohibition a migration and its verification have to break. In the one pair observed, the guided agent never opened the file and the unguided one read it and ran cmake anyway without saying why. No run has yet shown an agent following such a directive to the migration's cost. Adds a short paragraph to "Confirm scope": read them as information, do what the migration requires where they conflict, and record each directive set aside, with the reason, in any2bazel.json under "set_aside" (record-only; config.load ignores unknown keys; listed with the other fields). In the lab's later runs with this change, agents on pono, QGIS and YugabyteDB recorded the directives they set aside, each with a reason. This is a proposal for discussion. Whether setting aside a project's own instructions is better than following them is a judgment, and the evidence is a handful of runs. Lab-Proposal: P24 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Projects ship instructions for their own coding agents (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md), and some contradict what a migration must do. "Confirm scope" now says to read them as information, do what the migration requires where they conflict, and record each directive set aside, with the reason, under
set_asidein any2bazel.json (record-only).YugabyteDB's src/AGENTS.md says to use only its build script; in the one pair observed in any2bazel-lab, one agent never opened it and the other ran cmake anyway without saying why. In later runs, agents on pono, QGIS and YugabyteDB recorded the directives they set aside. For discussion: setting such instructions aside is a judgment, and the evidence is a handful of runs.
Stacked on #52 (tracking issue: #35).
pytest tests/: 186 passed (132 onmain). Lab proposal: P24.🤖 Generated with Claude Code