Stop Burning Tokens on Redundant Context: Why your AGENTS.md is failing

Choose your language / Elige tu idioma: 🇺🇸 English Version | 🇲🇽 Versión en Español Stop Burning Tokens on Redundant Context There is a ritual that has become almost universal among developers adopting AI coding agents: You set up a new project, run a command like /init , and watch an agent generate a shiny AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md ). It feels responsible. You feel like you’ve given your agent a "map" of the codebase. But here is the reality check: you might be making your agent slower, more expensive, and less accurate. Inspired by Addy Osmani’s recent deep-dive , I started looking into the data behind this "context ritual." Recent research from 2026 reveals a counter reality: auto generated context files can actually reduce task success by 2-3% while inflating costs by over 20% . The Redundancy Loop Why does this happen? According to research from ETH Zurich ( Kocetkov et al., 2026 ), we are often giving agents a map of a room they are already standing in. If an agent can already see y