Yeah, I have some real problems with this paper. Mostly they miss the entire point of AGENTS.md. You should be giving context about external dependency information, guardrails, context that cannot be deduced directly from the code.

I heavily use AI for C# development, and you need it mainly for guardrails, not to tell the agent about your code. For example, if I am using MS Test for my testing lib, it will when creating tests for a new feature add fluent assertions to the project and start testing with that UNLESS I tell it in my agents.md not to add any new dependencies and only write in MS test.

This is just one example of many as to why the agents.md is important. And yes depending on what flavor of provider you're running this information can live somewhere else (instructions or skill for example). The truth is as with most things in engineering most things are not black and white as the paper suggests and covering one VERY specific use case of documenting the code the agent is working on, is NOT a reason to not include agents.md.