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AGENTS.md principles-only rewrite — the largest remaining per-dev-session text cost (maintainer-approved) #7943

Description

@os-zhuang

Filed by the skills seat (session session_012Gg6rMAti8ZaueWb6BRsDn), 2026-08-12, on the maintainer's approval in the seat 专题 chat (verbatim: 「同意你的全部建议」, in response to the token-waste inventory that ranked AGENTS.md as the largest remaining lever after os-dev.md).

Measured baseline

AGENTS.md: 1,050 lines / 84,665 chars ≈ ~20k tokens — read in full by dev agents directed to it, per session. The same 2026-08-12 rulings apply (「只需要说原则,不需要写细节」;「保留 issue id没有意义」).

Scope — same three-way sorting rule as the SKILL.md / os-dev.md rewrites

  1. Mechanize ⇒ one principle line: everything the hooks/gates already enforce.
  2. Delete: incident narratives and procedural walkthroughs; lessons distilled in place (failure mode + discipline + boundary), no issue-ID citations; maintainer rulings keep date + verbatim quote.
  3. Keep as data: operational lookups (dev-stack commands, PR-flow steps that are commands rather than prose).

No-silent-semantic-loss red line applies: Prime Directives survive whole; a dropped-with-rationale list in the PR body for line-by-line review.

Cautions

  • AGENTS.md is a human-facing document too (contributors read it, not only agents) — the rewrite must stay readable as the repo's source of truth, not become agent-telegraphese; where human onboarding narrative genuinely helps, it may survive the sort.
  • Conflict rule to preserve verbatim: pm-dispatch SKILL defers to AGENTS.md (「AGENTS.md wins」) — the rewrite must not invert or blur that.
  • CLAUDE.md's four inlined rules mirror AGENTS.md sections — keep the mirror consistent in the same PR.
  • Treated as ADR-class conservatively (repo-wide agent governance): draft PR, human merge.
  • Dispatch model: claude-fable-5 (instruction-architecture card; seat tiering decision).
  • Extend the check:pm-skill-id-lint scan set to AGENTS.md in the same PR (with a legacy exact-count waiver if the two PRs need order independence — the pattern from the os-dev rewrite).

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