I think the key here is “if X then Y syntax” - this seems to be quite effective at piercing through the “probably ignore this” system message by highlighting WHEN a given instruction is “highly relevant”

What?

It helps when questions intended to resolve ambiguity are not themselves hopelessly ambiguous.

See also: "Help me help you" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Maguire

Yeah I don't trust any agent to follow document references consistently. I just manually add the relevant files to context every single time.

Though I know some people who have built an mcp that does exactly this: https://www.usable.dev/

It's basically a chat-bot frontend to your markdown files, with both rag and graph db indexes.

That makes sense given that it's trained on real world developers.