They’re definitely not, Claude and all other agents frequently forget the build and test commands present in CLAUDE/etc.md for my various repos (even though most of them were were initialized by the AI).

Whether Claude and co understand is probably not a great proxy for whether your docs are good for humans.

Hmmm, in my experience if something like documentation confuses the current SOTA LLMs, then it will confuse the average developer for sure.

I had the other direction in mind: you can put together some text that the average LLM will figure out, but that will be really annoying for your average developer.

Eg if you write your instructions in a mixture of base 64, traditional Chinese, morse code and Polish, the LLM will still figure it out.

Not the case at all. AI agents will happily turn your bad ideas into code.

Non sequitur?

I am talking about LLMs figuring out how to build your project with some bad and incomplete instructions plus educated guessing.