Vercel's research shows that embedding a compressed 8KB docs index in AGENTS.md achieves a 100% pass rate for Next.js 16 API evaluations, while skills maxed out at 79%, even with explicit instructions. This suggests that passive context provision via AGENTS.md is more effective than active retrieval with skills for framework-specific knowledge in AI coding agents.
Vercel has open-sourced bash-tool, a Bash execution engine for AI agents, enabling them to run filesystem-based commands to retrieve context for model prompts. It allows agents to handle large local contexts without embedding entire files, by running shell-style operations like find, grep, and jq.
