Agent won’t adhere to agents.md file | Friends of the Crustacean 🦞🤝 | Page 1

tame cave Apr 21, 2026, 10:46 PM

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I’ve tried just about everything I can think of and my agent can think of and no matter what constraints we put in place I can’t keep the agent from narrating everything it’s doing during tasks and driving up the session context. I’m having to start new sessions frequently and burning through tokens because it won’t stop giving me play by plays. It’s at the point now where the AI itself is out of ideas to force itself to adhere to the instruction. Seemed like a massive problem.

white martenBOT Apr 21, 2026, 10:46 PM

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brittle heronBOT Apr 21, 2026, 10:46 PM

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white martenBOT Apr 21, 2026, 10:46 PM

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hidden urchinBOT Apr 21, 2026, 10:49 PM

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First thing, can you paste openclaw --version?

What you’re describing usually is not the agent “ignoring AGENTS.md”. It’s usually session/tool verbosity, which AGENTS.md does not control.

Try these in the noisy chat/session as standalone messages:

/verbose off
/trace off
/reasoning off

A couple gotchas:

/verbose off creates a session override, so if it keeps coming back, open the Sessions view in Control UI and set verbose back to inherit
also check your config for verboseDefault, because if that’s on or full, every new session starts noisy

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Config default should look like:

{
  agents: {
    defaults: {
      verboseDefault: "off"
    }
  }
}

Relevant docs:

#Agent won’t adhere to agents.md file