Agent Lore
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Agent lore is the accumulated tribal knowledge about how to get the best behavior out of specific AI agents. 'If you prompt Claude Code this way, it won't overengineer.' 'Cursor composer mode does X but composer-agent does Y.' It's becoming its own career skill.
Real Talk
Agent lore refers to informal, community-curated knowledge about the idiosyncrasies and optimal usage patterns of specific AI coding agents. Includes prompting techniques, known failure modes, version differences, and workflow recipes. Shared in Discord servers, X threads, and blog posts. Fragile — agent updates can invalidate lore overnight, hence the need for empirical verification.
When You'll Hear This
"That's Claude Code lore — passing the CLAUDE.md at session start beats putting it in every prompt." / "The agent lore changes every model release."
Related Terms
AI Agent
An AI Agent is an AI system that can think, plan, and act on its own to accomplish a goal.
Claude Code
Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal.
Cursor
Cursor is a code editor (forked from VS Code) with AI built into every interaction.
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the art of talking to AI so it actually does what you want.