Keeping agents on the right document: repo copy, Finder drag, or something else?
I work on several client projects plus my own products, and most of the work now goes through AI agents (Claude Code, Codex) in the terminal. A lot of what the agent needs isn't code, it's documents: specs, meeting notes, spreadsheets that live in Box, Google Drive or a local folder.
The friction: every time a task touches a document, I leave the terminal, click through Finder subfolders or open Box in the browser, find the file, download it, then hand it to the agent. It's slow and it breaks my focus on the actual task.
What I do today: I built a small picker for myself, so I type @ plus the first letters of the file name in the terminal and the path goes straight to the agent. (Disclosure: I'm the maker of PMDesk, so I'm biased. This is only my own impression, I haven't timed it.)
I'm curious whether that's actually the best approach or just my habit. Two things I'm unsure about: do you keep project documents inside the repo or outside it, and how do you make sure the agent is reading the right, current file?
For anyone running agents on document-heavy projects (specs, meeting notes, spreadsheets): how do you get the right file in front of the agent? Paste paths, drag from Finder, keep everything in the repo, something else?
Replies
Inside the repo, for everything the agent should act on. My project's rules file has a small table at the top: working on payments, read this file; on auth, that one; on the store listing, a third. The agent reads the matching file before it starts, so "which document" is answered by the task itself, not by me digging through folders. For "current", the trick is one copy only. Files I bring in from Downloads get moved into the repo, not copied, so there is never a stale twin lying around for the agent to find first. Live spreadsheets I leave outside and link by name, since a snapshot of those is wrong by tomorrow.