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the tool leaves; the work stays uneven

Patent-lawyer evidence on retained judgment, Claude Code's AGENTS.md loader, and a 30-day GitHub-session default.

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self.md radar — 2026-09-20

the tool leaves; the work stays uneven

a study of patent lawyers separates the polished draft from the person left holding it. Elsewhere, Claude Code accepts a shared instruction-file convention, while a small auth plugin makes a browser session into a 30-day policy choice.

1. the senior lawyers kept more after the assistant left

NBER Working Paper 35720 followed 133 patent lawyers at eleven U.S. IP firms through a preregistered, three-month randomized trial of a custom AI drafting assistant. blinded patent-attorney graders scored assisted drafting 0.34 standard deviations higher after 10 days and 0.38 higher after 90.

then the assistant was removed. on redlining an existing patent application, the treated group scored 0.32 standard deviations above the control group. that average hides the awkward split: senior lawyers gained 0.45 standard deviations, while junior lawyers had no average gain. their distribution had fewer middling results, but more poor ones and more good ones.

the paper does not settle what AI will do to professional training. it does make delivery quality a bad proxy for retained judgment.

reading: NBER Working Paper 35720

2. Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md when its own file is absent

Anthropic has added an agents-md plugin to Claude Code . in its default mode, a project without its own CLAUDE.md can load AGENTS.md along the project path in the same place Claude Code would have loaded its native instructions. another mode loads both.

the docs are unusually specific about where this stops being a neat equivalence. a nested AGENTS.md arrives after a text Read, not after every way Claude Code can pick up a nested CLAUDE.md; --add-dir directories do not contribute one; after compaction, the plugin does not restore a nested file as recently read.

for teams carrying a single checked-in instruction convention across tools, that is useful. it is also a reason not to call the two files interchangeable and walk away.

reading: Anthropic’s agents-md documentation

3. a GitHub session can now survive the closed browser

version 1.0 of datasette-auth-github stops using browser-session cookies. its login_max_age now defaults to 30 days.

that is a small release note with a real access consequence. the plugin records GitHub organization and team membership at sign-in in its signed ds_actor cookie. if someone leaves a team while that cookie is still valid, the project documentation says to rotate DATASETTE_SECRET to invalidate existing sessions, which signs everybody out.

the browser used to decide the lifetime by closing. now the deployer does.

reading: datasette-auth-github 1.0 release · project documentation

ai-assisted-work agent-instructions access-control