Ask what a new hire needs to be useful in an unfamiliar codebase: the tech stack, the directory map, the architecture, the conventions, the commands, and — most valuable — the list of things not to do that everyone else learned the hard way.
Now ask what an AI coding agent needs. It’s the same list, exactly.
That equivalence is the unlock. The moment you write that context down as files in the repo — instead of leaving it in senior engineers’ heads and Slack scrollback — you solve both problems at once. A human reads it on day one; an agent reads it on every task. And because it lives in git, the context holds across developers and outlasts the people who wrote it.
The failure mode is treating agent config as a special AI chore. It isn’t. It’s onboarding documentation that finally has a second, tireless reader — which is the forcing function that gets it written at all.