Instruction Adherence in Coding Agent Configuration Files: A Factorial Study of Four File-Structure Variables
Frontier coding agents read configuration files (CLAUDE$.$md, AGENTS$.$md, Cursor Rules) at session start and are expected to follow the conventions inside them. Practitioners assume that structural choices (file size, instruction position, file architecture, contradictions in adjacent files) measurably affect adherence. We report a systematic factorial study of these choices using four manipulated variables, measuring compliance with a trivial target annotation across 1,650 Claude Code CLI sessions (16,050 function-level observations) on two TypeScript codebases, three frontier models (primarily Sonnet 4.6, with Opus 4.6 as a CLI-matched cross-model check and Opus 4.7 reported descriptiv...
| Authors | Damon McMillan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 11 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 May 2026 |
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