Stop Burning Your Context Cash - Better with Kent | Lyssna här

A giant AGENTS.md feels responsible. It is often just burning tokens. Kent walks the Claude Code 80% cut, a research paper that found +20% cost for little gain, a live prune of his own file, and homework: make the always-on file a router, not an encyclopedia.

(00:00) - Cold open: you're burning context dollars
(00:43) - Better with Kent intro
(00:59) - Claude Code cut 80% of the system prompt
(01:43) - When system prompt, skills, and user requests clash
(03:05) - Context engineering best practices that became myths
(04:12) - Avoid stating the obvious / progressive disclosure
(04:42) - You don't need useMemo for your agent
(05:36) - Performance optimizations are not free
(06:17) - Research: AGENTS.md often doesn't help (+20% cost)
(07:06) - The cargo-cult loop
(07:24) - Overstuffed AGENTS.md walkthroughs
(09:01) - If the agent can find it in the repo, cut it
(09:54) - Live prune of my own AGENTS.md
(14:05) - I audited 37 agents
(15:30) - AGENTS.md should be a router
(16:30) - Shrink always-on context
(18:30) - Homework: slim the always-on file
(19:54) - Close: get better together

Better with Kent - durable skills for people who ship software.

Stuffing AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and auto-loaded skills because it feels responsible is the new useMemo-everywhere cargo cult. Context is not free. Claude Code cut about 80% of its system prompt for newer models. A research paper evaluating AGENTS.md found those files often do not improve task success while increasing inference cost by over 20%.

Kent walks real overstuffed files (discoverable repo trees, package managers, test commands the agent can find itself), then prunes his own Kody AGENTS.md live: keep what the repo is for, keep landmines, keep a short index, cut the rest. He audited 37 of his own agents from one day: 0 re-read AGENTS.md, 86% pulled docs and skills on demand, and most went straight to the leaf.

The durable skill: treat the always-on file as a tiny map. Progressively disclose the rest. Measure whether the extra tokens still help after the models change underneath you.

Homework: take 15-30 minutes with your agent. Rip out everything discoverable from the repo. Keep the gotchas that trip it every time. Index the rest. Delete docs nobody has opened.

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