Read Your Own AGENTS.md Whole; Bound Foreign Context
Read Your Own AGENTS.md Whole; Bound Foreign Context An agent runtime has two conflicting duties when it loads project instructions: preserve the rules that govern its own work, and keep an arbitrary external file from consuming the entire prompt. Treating both files the same creates a bad trade-off. A small universal limit can silently remove a project’s own critical rules; no limit lets any…
The article discusses the challenges of balancing the needs of an agent runtime and external project context files when loading project instructions. The key points are that a small universal limit can unintentionally cut off critical rules from a project's own file, while a fixed cap may also remove important information from a foreign file referenced by the project.
To address this, the APX runtime treats the project's AGENTS.md and .apc/ files as the portable context layer, while applying a configurable budget to foreign project files. This ensures that the project's own contract is read in full, while external context is limited to prevent issues with cost and reliability. The article emphasizes that this ownership decision should be made by the project authors and not an invisible runtime truncation.
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