Persona Lines in AI Instruction Files Correlate With Lower Quality Scores

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A study of the 10,000 most-starred repositories found 285 main AI instruction files, such as CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, that open with a 'You are a...' persona line. On the ails check 0 to 10 scale, these files had a median score of 6.6, compared with 7.7 for the other 20,551 main files. The gap persisted across all four file-size groups, ranging from 0.9 to 1.25 points. The analysis attributes the difference to the rest of the file: persona files devote more lines to instructions, and their prohibitions are more often written as strong 'never' statements without matching permissions, hedged, or weakly ordered. The author suggests replacing persona lines with specific, tool-named directives.

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