Coding agents mostly read the instruction files and notes they were given or wrote themselves, so your AGENTS.md deserves more care than your API reference.

because that is what agents actually read, not your API reference.

The authors tracked 3,033 documentation events across 557 real agent coding sessions, plus file changes in 33,097 agent-written pull requests.

Instruction files like AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md were 35.4% of that activity, and the agent's own plans and notes another 25.1%. API references got 1.3%, troubleshooting guides 0.4%. Agents also wrote these files nearly as often as they read them.

More importantly, the assumed read-the-docs-then-write-the-code loop barely showed up. Only 3 of 1,328 documentation reads led straight to a code edit, and the authors found no case of an agent checking its work against documentation.

– arxiv. org/abs/2608.20195

Title: "From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Empirical Study of How Coding Agents Discover, Read, and Write Technical Documentation"