What to build instead of AI agents

Building agents has been fun for me, but it's clear that there are serious problems with "context engineering" that must be overcome with new ideas. In particular, no matter how big the context window size is increased - one must curate what the agent sees: agents don't have very effective filters on what is relevant to supercharge them on tasks, and so (a) you must leave *.md files strewn about to help guide them and (b) you must put them into roles. The *.md system is essentially a rudimentary memory system, but it could get be made significantly more robust, and could involve e.g. constructing programs and models (in natural language) on the fly, guided by interactions with the user.

What Claude Code has taught me is that steering an agent via a test suite is an extremely powerful reinforcement mechanism (the feedback loop leads to success, most of the time) -- and I'm hopeful that new thinking will extend this into the other "soft skills" that an agent needs to become an increasingly effective collaborator.

Is there a recommended way to construct .md files for such a system? For instance when I make them for human consumption they'd have lots of markup for readability but that may or may not be consumable by an llm. Can you create a .md the same as for human consumption that doesn't hinder an llm?

I've had very good experience with building a very architecture-conscious folder structure and putting AGENTS.md in every folder (and, of course, instruction to read _and_ update those in the root prompt). But with Agent-written docs I also have to run doc maintainer agent pretty often.