The State of AI Instruction Quality

Everybody has opinions about AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md files. Best practices get shared. Templates get copied, and this folk-type knowledge dominates the industry. Last year, GitHub analyzed 2,500 repos and published best-practice advice. We wanted to go further: measure at scale, publish the data, and let anyone verify. When the agent doesn't follow instructions and does something contradictory, the usual suspects are: the model is inconsistent, LLMs are not deterministic, you need better guardrails,