---
title: "Counterintuitivity bias"
date: 2026-09-20
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2101547919375794513/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2101547919375794513
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

There is an effect that I call "counterintuitivity bias"

When something goes against what you know to be true so much, you doubt yourself like "huh, maybe I am dumb after all"

Don't fall for this. Agent instructions will always be needed, in a repo context, in a global context

You will want your agent to know your name, your github id, project specific terms and workflows, off the bat

This is because of the limitations of in-context learning. Those limitations necessitate knowledge of certain facts and behavior to be piled up in an accessible place, before that knowledge can be transferred to the weights. That place is the AGENTS.md

That means there will always be need for something like AGENTS.md, even in the presence of fully developed continual learning. It is a version of short-term memory, a staging area for knowledge

The non rage-baiting advice would be "keep a lean AGENTS.md, clean it up every once in a while, don't bloat it too much, revise it after new model releases". Which you should do

Until then, ignore such senseless advice, smh

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTJnbzytAkBWpsc83/contradiction-appeal-bias

*Quotes a post by another author (https://x.com/i/status/2101504679414784294); its text is omitted here because it is not covered by this site's license.*