Author here. To pre-empt the obvious question: yes, you could write a shell script to check if paths exist. The value here is three things a shell script doesn't do:
1. Framework-specific pattern detection — knowing that @NgModule is stale in Angular 14+, or that ReactDOM.render() was removed in React 19, requires versioned knowledge about what's current vs. deprecated. That's not a grep.
2. The weekly CI schedule — context rot happens even when AGENTS.md hasn't changed. Your codebase evolves around a static file. A one-time check misses this entirely.
3. Cross-file consistency — if you have both AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md, they can silently contradict each other. One says `npm run test`, the other says `npm run test:unit`. Agents pick one arbitrarily.
A few things I found on real repos while building this: steipete/agent-scripts has absolute paths like ~/Projects/bird/bird in their AGENTS.md — works on one MacBook, fails silently everywhere else. The official agentsmd/agents.md spec repo says "execute the test suite (if present)" in their own AGENTS.md — they're not sure if they have tests. The sample AGENTS.md that everyone copy-pastes includes Turborepo monorepo commands that break in single-package projects.
None of this is criticism — it's just how files rot. Happy to answer questions about the design.
Author here. To pre-empt the obvious question: yes, you could write a shell script to check if paths exist. The value here is three things a shell script doesn't do:
1. Framework-specific pattern detection — knowing that @NgModule is stale in Angular 14+, or that ReactDOM.render() was removed in React 19, requires versioned knowledge about what's current vs. deprecated. That's not a grep.
2. The weekly CI schedule — context rot happens even when AGENTS.md hasn't changed. Your codebase evolves around a static file. A one-time check misses this entirely.
3. Cross-file consistency — if you have both AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md, they can silently contradict each other. One says `npm run test`, the other says `npm run test:unit`. Agents pick one arbitrarily.
A few things I found on real repos while building this: steipete/agent-scripts has absolute paths like ~/Projects/bird/bird in their AGENTS.md — works on one MacBook, fails silently everywhere else. The official agentsmd/agents.md spec repo says "execute the test suite (if present)" in their own AGENTS.md — they're not sure if they have tests. The sample AGENTS.md that everyone copy-pastes includes Turborepo monorepo commands that break in single-package projects.
None of this is criticism — it's just how files rot. Happy to answer questions about the design.