But think of your dad or grandma using a generic agent, and simply selecting that they want to have certain skills available to it. Don't even think of it as a chat interface. This is just some option that they set in their phone assistant app. Or, rather, it may be that they actually selected "Determine the best skills based on context", and the assistant has "skill packs" which it periodically determines it needs to enable based on key moments in the conversation or latest interactions.
These are all workarounds for the problems of learning, memory...and, ultimately, limited context. But they for sure will be extremely useful.
I have mine in a GitHub template so I can even use them in Claude Code for the web. And synchronise them across my various machine (which is about 6 machines atm).
Just like you I don't edit much in these files on my own. Mostly just ask the model to update an md file whenever I think we've figured out something new, so the learning sticks. I have files for test writing, backend route writing, db migration writing, frontend component writing etc. Whenever a section gets too big to live in agents.md it gets it's own file.