Hi All, Second round of this (the first was 28,721 repos back in April | https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1srm2vv/we_analyzed_12356_repos_with_claudemd_files/ ). This time: the 10,000 most-starred English-language repos that ship instructions for a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini), September 2026 snapshot, 15,237 agent setups. Full disclosure: I work on reporails, the checker these numbers come from. TL;DR: Stars don’t predict quality. Correlation between stars and score is -0.028 across 9,674 repos. A famous repo’s CLAUDE.md scores like anyone else’s, so read it before you copy it. 91% of repos have at least one vague instruction , one that names no file, command or tool. Count only the lines that actually tell the agent what to do, and about 1 in 3 is like that. Think “unless absolutely necessary”, “opt for more performant solutions”, “lint must pass” with no lint command anywhere in the file. It’s the most common finding, not the only one. 96.6% of repos have at least one finding, 38 in the median repo. 88% have instructions too short to register (“Run tests.”), 70% have hedged ones (“should”, “try to”). The agent doesn’t change it either. 32 to 36 vague instructions per 100, whether it’s Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini, Codex or a plain AGENTS.md. Sub-agents are the weakest files. 19.6% of sub-agent files score below 5 out of 10, vs 6.8% of main files. In .claude/agents it’s 22.9%. They also carry the most directives (median 19 vs 12), and 57% have a “You are a…” line. Almost nobody enforces anything. 7.6% of repos have an agent hook of any kind (9.8% of Claude Code setups). For the rest, nothing at the agent’s own level checks whether the instructions were followed. Skills took over. SKILL.md (13,361 files) now outnumbers both AGENTS.md (11,248) and CLAUDE.md (8,838), and skills are the biggest share of files for every agent except Gemini. 43% of repos write for more than one agent , most often Claude Code plus AGENTS.md. One thing from April didn’t hold: “the most-copied skills are the vaguest”. No relationship this time (188 skills copied into 5+ repos). Quick self-test, no tool needed: for each instruction in your CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md, does it name the file, command or tool it’s about? Methods in one line: only the files each agent loads by default, at the paths its docs specify; repo code and linked docs are out of scope; 158 of the largest setups (skill and rule libraries with 150+ artifacts) aren’t in these figures yet. Full write-up and the dataset if anyone wants the numbers behind it is in the comments. submitted by /u/cleverhoods
Originally posted by u/cleverhoods on r/ClaudeCode
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