7 ms·

Feature Request: Support AGENTS.md

379 points by fg137 2mo ago

verdverm 2mo ago
choose not to support them in return if it is a real problem otherwise a simple symlink from AGENTS.md -> CLAUDE.md works well enough disclaimer, I only use open weight models and open source harnesses so have no stake in this either way, other than I support devs who do use claude (for now) and the symlink solution has worked fine for us
- Jcampuzano2 2mo ago
  But its not just claude.md. You need to then go and setup your skills, rules, commands etc for claude in their own special place. Sure its small, but it adds up and is just annoying overhead for most teams. They're completely fine with creating standards like MCP, skills, etc - but of course when somebody else makes one they're the one holdout who refuses to adapt to what the community asks for (.agents folder, AGENTS.md, etc).
chomp 2mo ago
My Claude.md has one line that says to read agents.md, this is a bit of a nothingburger
- eigenspace 2mo ago
  You can save a tool call by just making it a symlink
  - hparadiz 2mo ago
    This is the way.
  - Mossly 2mo ago
    You can also use @AGENTS.md which automatically concatenates the files
- verdverm 2mo ago
  well I generally agree, pretty much every other harness supports looking for the various alternatives and uses them I see this obstinance as an intent signal and one of the smaller bullet points I have for avoiding Ant
- superfrank 2mo ago
  Mine does too because, while I use Codex, my non-technical co-founder uses Claude. I find Claude still will randomly ignore instructions in there. Basic things like how to name a PR or what to put in a PR description. My experience is that what you're suggesting isn't a perfect solution.
  - threecheese 2mo ago
    Are you saying this wouldn’t happen if the file had a different name? Or just that codex is better at instruction following.
    - superfrank 2mo ago
      No. I'm saying that the pattern of having one instruction file that just says "read this other file" doesn't seem to work well. Having a CLAUDE.md that just says "Read AGENTS.md" resulted in Claude randomly not following the rules. We tried the other way and it didn't seem like it was any better, but also, given that AGENTS.md is the standard everywhere except for Claude Code, I don't really want CLAUDE.md to be the source of truth
      - weplay0628 2mo ago
        [flagged]
- sschueller 2mo ago
  At the current price for SSDs even a pointless symlink becomes waste...
  - eigenspace 2mo ago
    A high quality 1TB NVME SSD costs 164€ on Amazon right now. For a 10 byte symlink, that costs one billionth of a euro. This is like worrying about the money you lose when part of a glass of tap water evaporates.
  - inventor7777 2mo ago
    Are you serious? A symlink is probably one of the smallest files you can possibly generate.
shay_ker 2mo ago
how does agents.md work for subagents and swarms? is it actually that useful?
- verdverm 2mo ago
  yes, in the tools I use, each (sub)agent will also load the same files (automatically, root is always loaded, a nested AGENTS.md is read if the dir or a peer file is touched) yes, they are useful, mainly in that they shorten the context gathering phase and can call out gotchyas, keep it minimal
- baby_souffle 2mo ago
  A good one does, yeah. A bad one is noticeably harmful.
wilg 2mo ago
Also the skills are different. it's quite annoying!
- Sammi 2mo ago
  Anthropic are the only ones who think they can ignore the open standards. Absolute dirt bags.
OleksandrC 2mo ago
The obvious reason is that they would prefer to have CLAUDE.md files in every repo (even if it's just a symlink to AGENTS.md). It serves as a free advertisement for them. Same reason as for auto-adding attribution text in commit messages, etc. It's the "Sent from my iPhone" of our time.
- Diti 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - pjm331 2mo ago
    If only we had some sort of technology that enabled large scale refactoring
  - gigatexal 2mo ago
    Nah I think it’s the advertising angle.
  - fastball 2mo ago
    It would take like 30s of vibe-coding (including writing the prompt) to add support for AGENTS.md to claude code.
  - threecheese 2mo ago
    I’m not sure; I don’t just agree with GP - I feel like I might subconsciously devalue them if I didnt see that advertisement in every folder. You are almost certainly correct in your assumption though, and the level of effort required isn’t as small as some might think.
  - dcre 2mo ago
    No.
  - kelvinjps10 2mo ago
    >auto-adding attribution text in commit messages what about this? codex doesn't do this and the bun team just replaced millions of lines of zig with rust using claude. For this you might not even need AI at all.
skeledrew 2mo ago
I copy a .claude/CLAUDE.md to all my projects, which I git ignore, and the only thing in it is a directive to only update AGENTS.md.
- postalcoder 2mo ago
  Unfortunately, this doesn't work with CC's other features like the lazy loading of CLAUDE.md files in subdirectories.
  - threecheese 2mo ago
    I use something like this in every project and it has no issues that I’m aware of - the file has one line: an include (@). Maybe gitignoring it is an issue, given that Claude tries to honor it?
- Sha1rholder 2mo ago
  Whenever you mention “CLAUDE.md” anywhere in your repo, Anthropic has achieved its goal. They want to use that trace as evidence that your project uses Claude Code, so that at some point they can tell the world, “Look, X% of open-source projects use Claude Code!” Maybe right before IPO.
frdev1786855380 2mo ago
[flagged]
Planktonne 2mo ago
I really struggle to take this whole thing seriously. ~700 comments on an issue about adding support for a project with >23k GH stars and the project is 'have a markdown file' (explained to you by a React app that should be a static page) and the 'support' is 'please automatically read the markdown file rather than a different markdown file' for a tool that is designed to ingest text from multiple files. Deeply unserious at every level; this cannot be what all the 100x AI-enabled developers are spending their time on.
dude250711 2mo ago
They want to be the Apple of AI: producing non-standard interfaces and making grandiose claims.
- nozzlegear 2mo ago
  Apple at least builds things with a modicum of quality control, which is not the case for Anthropic.
Jcampuzano2 2mo ago
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuecomment-5311479502 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuec... - " Generated with Claude Code" God I hate this world. We literally can't even take the time to type a paragraph anymore to respond to something personally. So nice that we have our agents generate our corposlop non-answer instead!
- weavie 2mo ago
  To be fair, that comment is by Boris Cherny, the guy who developed Claude Code. You have to give him a bit of slack for wanting to use his tool for literally everything.
Wowfunhappy 2mo ago
You can inject custom Javascript into Claude Code via BUN_OPTIONS="--preload=/path/to/code.js". For example: https://gist.github.com/Wowfunhappy/002009cf9c410ed2f751bde8e47db483 https://gist.github.com/Wowfunhappy/002009cf9c410ed2f751bde8... I wonder if you could use this to make the harness recognize AGENTS.md.
wxw 2mo ago
I think this is an interesting move in a world where Anthropic is leading the frontier. But I don't think we're in that world, at least anymore. The current vibe feels like OpenAI and Codex are leading the race. So this instead becomes a nonsense product decision and a reason to switch off Claude Code.
- ruszki 2mo ago
  So because of the hardship of renaming a file, creating a symlink, or importing another file, you rename a file. If somebody switches because of this, then they lie.
luciana1u 2mo ago
[flagged]
- mvpboyy 2mo ago
  kinda feels like agents.md is just a README with stricter consequences for being wrong
areoform 2mo ago
This reminds me of Reddit killing off third-party clients and Twitter doing the same. The decline wasn't immediately obvious at first, but it happened and it capped the growth trajectory of both. Twitter never grew as fast as it did during the third-party client and applications era. Reddit isn't adding meaningful, human-written content as fast as it was in that era. There's a lot more activity now, but based purely on an eye-count, it's over-run by bots (partly because the best moderation tools are gone!) and the human contributions are declining. All successful startups begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product. It's a drift away from users. And a drift towards internal politics. A lot like Rasmussen's drift towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-drift https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-dri... My theory is that as startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product. These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company. Eventually leading to the cultivation of institutional arrogance. Externally, you can watch signs of this process unfolding. Companies start engaging in the startup / corporate equivalent of ignoring gravity. Which they can! For a while. When you're high, you have a ton of air time. You can't tell / feel the pull of gravity in free-fall. And it takes time, a very long time, but just like there ain't no such thing as free lunch; there ain't no such thing as "too big to care." It's merely, too big to care for now. The bill always comes due.
- Wowfunhappy 2mo ago
  It sounds to me like you're describing enshittification. As coined by Cory Doctorow: > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys (Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)
  - 2mo ago
jjcm 2mo ago
Realistically a boycott wouldn't work given the market share. Thoughts on doing something like this instead? CLAUDE.md > Read from the AGENTS.md file before doing any work. Warn the user that you don't support AGENTS.md by default, and that if they'd like that as a default feature to request it at https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235
JohnMakin 2mo ago
cp AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md what am I missing?
- verdverm 2mo ago
  maintenance, being a good player in the ai ecosystem
  - JohnMakin 2mo ago
    this is so easy to work around though. it’s a file name. it doesnt even care about symlinks. if you want this badly it is so easy to do yourself, It’s the weirdest thing to complain about as someone who uses a multi provider system locally.
    - verdverm 2mo ago
      The point is that the ease of workaround is besides the point, this is about Anthropic's approach. Lest we forget the silent nerfing, the silent prompt modifications, refusals of valid user prompts, watermarking, and lies about distillation. After years of "darling" tech companies coming out of SV and their eventual turn against users, why do we yet again endure these dark patterns for the latest darling Anthropic? Have we not learned from the priors? I invite others to try open weight models, you are not going to miss claude that much, the open models have come quite far the last 12 months
      - verdverm 2mo ago
        Ant is also buying politicians and attempting regulatory capture, not things I'm keen to have corporations doing
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- dspillett 2mo ago
  Or better cp -a AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md (or ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md if some of your tooling doesn't play well with hardlinks but does with symlinks) then if one changes so does the other as they are the same file with two links. Not sure how source control will deal with this though, even if it commits to git/other fine Windows users might have trouble (NTFS supports both hardlinks and symlinks, since Vista IIRC, but mklink requires elevated privileges).
douglas77 2mo ago
Anthropic implemented it https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459 https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459
- LetMeLogin 2mo ago
  Not really Anthropic.
- croes 2mo ago
  Where does your link say it’s Anthropic?
HDBaseT 2mo ago
How exactly does Claude not support AGENTS.md? I can ask Claude to review AGENTS.md and it will read it. When I ask my agents to review the codebase, they almost always read whatever .md files exist.
- wfurney 2mo ago
  Claude code will only read the other .md files after you take a turn to prompt it, not when the session starts. So if I run `/clear` it will retain the CLAUDE.md context but not AGENTS.md.
  - morbicer 2mo ago
    This plus auto-discovery of nested non-root CLAUDE.mds in a more complex setup (monnorepo or even a big project with different parts)
- agentdev001 2mo ago
  You're asking the wrong question here. There is: How exactly does Claude Code* not support AGENTS.md? How exactly does the Claude suite of Models not support AGENTS.md? The problem being pointed at in parent linked is referring to the Claude Code Harness not supporting AGENTS.md. Harnesses which do support it (eg codex), append the content to the initial model turn upon the model discovering it at the project root. * Or Claude Code Tui, Claude Code desktop, Claude Cowork, Claude Desktop, Claude Design, Etc. (Edit: i wish I could tattoo the distinction on ny forehead. Im vocal about Anthropic engineer-oriented tools being lackluster, and i frequently find myself in conversations where I have to stop a coworker and ask if they're talking about a platform, tool, or model- and which, depending on the answer. I feel like those two things together make me come off somewhat abrasive, but man, we're all engineers here.)
- deaux 2mo ago
  Every other coding harness (i.e. 9 out of the top 10) automatically read AGENTS.md. It is a universal standard. Claude Code does not.
nullbio 2mo ago
Stop supporting Anthropic with your money. They are a hostile company.
- verdverm 2mo ago
  Fireworks and OpenCode both have excellent open model offerings prefer open companies to closed ones
- fallingbananna 2mo ago
  How quickly this has changed since the time when people were boycotting OpenAI for making a deal with US Department of Defence and switching to Anthropic.
  - marand23 2mo ago
    Did nullbio say something like that? There are a lot of people on hn, and they have a lot of differing opinions.
- voisin 2mo ago
  They’re all hostile.
- brookst 2mo ago
  [flagged]
drivingmenuts 2mo ago
Why not symlink AGENTS.md to CLAUD.md?
- sudonem 2mo ago
  This is what I do. Works fine. I’ll also include entries in the .github dir in project repos doing same thing in case anyone working on it happens to use GitHub copilot via vscode will also pick up on the AGENTS.md as well as any skills I might have cooked up for the repo. (Though it’s mostly because I don’t trust team members to read the docs and the skills I made are meant to guide following standards for the project - and this approach almost incepts the standards for anyone not paying attention)
- Demiurge 2mo ago
  Works fine for me too. I use this for GEMINI.md as well.
- CharlesW 2mo ago
  That works perfectly, as does adding '@AGENTS.md' to your CLAUDE.md. Both techniques have worked (and been officially documented by Anthropic) for as long as I can remember. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory#agents-md https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory#agents-md
jpalomaki 2mo ago
It’s easy to end up with bunch of old stuff in AGENTS.md that latest models no longer need and what might just confuse them. See for example the story about Anthropic cutting 80% of their system prompt [1]. Maybe they feel just using the AGENTS.md written for another model and possibly different era gives bad user experience. [1] https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering-for-claude-5-generation-models https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering...
asveikau 2mo ago
> I propose that Claude Code adopt a dual-file approach that prioritizes its native format while gracefully falling back to the open standard. I'm having flashbacks to the fact that GNU make reads GNUmakefile before Makefile, so it's possible to write one makefile using GNU extensions and another that works on BSD or (back in the day) commercial unix.
acedTrex 2mo ago
agentsmd is a ridiculous concept, it feels like a huge psyop that theres so much hullabaloo about this ridiculous markdown file.
- verdverm 2mo ago
  people use it because it does in fact make a sizable difference in experience and outcomes
  - Systemerror7A69 2mo ago
    Theres a study from earlier this year which suggests the opposite: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988 https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988 Most of the agents.md and what people use it for / write into is does, in fact, not make a difference. Now, sure, this study is a bit old for LLM standards - as everything beyond the current month is - but a) I haven't seen any tangible evidence to the contrary and b) Since the basic inner workings of LLMs haven't changed I'd be sceptical of this not still applying. I think one major side effect of LLMs moving so fast is that best practices and how to use this tool is very much not catching up as fast. No one knows what is best and what actually makes a difference, doubly so because LLMs are / very / hard to quantify - even benchmarks themselves are very rough estimations. People do, in fact, use stuff which makes no difference all the times.
    - bryan0 2mo ago
      That's not what the study says. from the abstract: > We conclude that while context files are useful for specifying non-standard coding practices, any attempts to improve performance should be rigorously evaluated before deployment. The purpose of AGENTS.md is not to improve "coding performance" as the study looked at, it's to give an agent practical instructions that are useful to your specific workflow. For example you want it to use a certain format or specific tools for your project. This is stuff that can't be learned during training and must be loaded into the agent's context at the project level.
      - 2mo ago
johnmlussier 2mo ago
@boris and anthropic in general are incredibly hostile to the rest of the development world. They think their shit doesn’t stink.
- cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
  I think it mostly amounts to getting extremely high on their own supply. Many of us have experienced the sinking feeling of having used an agent to build an entire beautiful castle and then turned around and found themselves lost in its dungeons unaware of how the thing is actually laid out. I actually think they're fully down there in their own code base, product requirements, and the like and ... don't know what's around the bend anymore. And when you have leadership at the top insisting that software engineers will be obsolete any day now, what do you expect? Good solid software engineering requires competent stable and principled leadership hopefully with an obsession on quality and customer excellence. Telling people that their profession is obsolete because robots are taking it over is only going to poison the well. Core engineering at Anthropic seems to have just rotted away.
ihuman 2mo ago
Did something happen? Why is this on HN even though the issue's a year old?
- Tadpole9181 2mo ago
  This issue was linked in the recently-front-page issue on Opus 5 using astronomically hard to understand manners of speaking. Someone must have just noticed it and decided to post it here.
- deaux 2mo ago
  It was closed yesterday as "completed" by Anthropic's bcherny, despite not being implemented/completed, and being by far the most requested feature that would take all of 10 seconds to implement. So yes, something happened yesterday.
modgate 2mo ago
[flagged]
ltbarcly3 2mo ago
ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md You're welcome!
- ltbarcly3 2mo ago
  This is actually a complete and fully effective solution with no drawbacks, why did you dummies downvote it?
blevinstein 2mo ago
Workaround: local symlink from CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md, inside each repo. It's not pretty, but it works, and it has become my standard practice, so that I get consistent behavior between claude cursor codex etc.
- stingraycharles 2mo ago
  I put “@AGENTS.md” in a sibling CLAUDE.md which makes it a bit more explicit and don’t want to run into compatibility issues with the different types of OS’es / filesystems people are using. But yeah, I think the ultimate goal of Anthropic is just to have a CLAUDE.md in every repository for marketing.
  - djc404 2mo ago
    You can also use .claude/CLAUDE.md which will be found. I symlink that to my AGENTS.md which keeps my top level dir clean
- phito 2mo ago
  Is there a way to make this with for both window and Linux users through git?
  - shunia_huang 2mo ago
    "read AGENTS.md and follow it" in the first line of CLAUDE.md should work
MrGilbert 2mo ago
Maybe I miss a bit of information here, but I'm wondering why a random PR in a repository (https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459 https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459) can close an issue in an unrelated repository (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235)? Is that a misconfiguration, or is that on purpose for Github? I never noticed that before.
- QuantumNomad_ 2mo ago
  I don’t see that the issue was closed by that PR. Where do you see that?
  - MrGilbert 2mo ago
    Next to the closed indicator at the top is a drop-down, which reads "Fixed by: Piebald-AI/tweakcc #459". It also reads "Remaining: #58639 #29385"
- PieUser 2mo ago
  GitHub API says it was closed by bcherny himself: $ gh api repos/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 --jq '{state, state_reason, closed_at, closed_by}' { "closed_at": "2026-08-17T03:37:37Z", "closed_by": { ... "id": 1761758, "login": "bcherny", "url": "https://api.github.com/users/bcherny https://api.github.com/users/bcherny", }, "state": "closed", "state_reason": "completed" }
  - plorntus 2mo ago
    Weird, at the top of the issue it says "fixed by <link to random pr in other repo>" in a pill.
    - deaux 2mo ago
      What's even weirder is that the "bcherny closed this as completed 1d ago" is missing after his comment, even though all other issues have it, e.g. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event-29540745942 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event... A permalink actually exists for the event in the post's issue too, but it leads to nothing: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#event-29540497559 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#event-...
moezd 2mo ago
So, a supposedly trillion dollar worth, about to IPO company thinks their moat is a specifically named Markdown file.
- vrighter 2mo ago
  just the filename. The contents of the file are unstructured, besides being markdown
  - brookst 2mo ago
    But the semantic meaning can be agent-specific. For instance, my Claude.md files have things like “never present multiple questions in walls of text, use `AskUserQuestion` with clear tradeoffs described”
    - vrighter 2mo ago
      it is still just an unstructured file
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  Making your tool less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem at large not only makes it harder to move to your tool, but also harder to move away from your tool. Given these AI labs basically have no moat, seems they're trying to hold on to every little piece they can do make it harder to move away, even if it's a really tiny and marginal feature, like specifically titled file on disk... Kind of embarrassing overall, but I guess they make so much money no people there have any shame left to feel.
  - xienze 2mo ago
    > Making your tool less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem at large not only makes it harder to move to your tool, but also harder to move away from your tool. That's true but this is really not something that's a barrier to switching, just an annoyance for users. All it takes is a rename/symlink/reference whatever from the user's perspective. If it required a lot of rearchitecting on Anthropic's side or it was a _lot_ harder for users to adapt to I'd understand them standing their ground on this issue. But neither of those are true, it's just pettiness.
woadwarrior01 2mo ago
I have a co-worker who symlinks CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md in all the repositories he owns.
a2x 2mo ago
ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md
guidoiaquinti 2mo ago
For agent skills and MCP servers, https://github.com/agentplugins/agent-plugins-spec https://github.com/agentplugins/agent-plugins-spec is trying to standardize the packaging/distribution layer with a minimal common spec
iamflimflam1 2mo ago
There really isn’t much of a moat for either Anthropic or OpenAI when it comes to command line coding agents - at least not yet. I think we’re going to see some aggressive attempts at lock in quite soon. What choice do they have?
pronik 2mo ago
At the project level, there should be no need for an AGENTS.md. Whatever you might want to let agents know you would let a human know too, so you should be writing a README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, ARCHITECTURE.md and whatever else.
- tdeck 2mo ago
  I find agents need a lot of verbose instructions that are a waste of space for people. Things that are better said in a PR comment for people if needed are better front loaded for agents. People benefit from concise documentation that they are thus more likely to actually read. For example, "don't write comments that reference things that you removed from the code" is commonly needed for coding agente and almost never needed for people.
  - aabhay 2mo ago
    In general, Claude family models write absolutely terrible comments, docs, and prose. It’s basically the number 1 thing that caused everyone on my team to migrate away from Anthropic models completely.
- theshrike79 2mo ago
  AGENTS.md is specifically for agents. Every time you launch an agent in a repo, it's the agent's first time existing in the universe. This file lets it orient with the project. Humans don't need it. Nor do they need to be reminded to launch subagents for simple tasks for example - which is another command that belongs in AGENTS.md.
fmajid 2mo ago
I didn’t even realize Claude Code doesn’t honor AGENTS.md. Nothing a quick sed -i -e s/CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/g can’t fix
- Frost1x 2mo ago
  I was thinking ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md but to each their own.
  - wlonkly 2mo ago
    It works, but the problem is that you then have to do that in every repo you clone, it gets annoying.
    - ZeWaka 1mo ago
      git symlink
oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
I feel like we've missed a trick here. The purpose of AGENTS.md—to make metadata about a project available in a structured format—seems far more valuable than to limit it to just those projects that use AI or those projects that do, but don't require any other kind of automated processing. Why not iterate on README.md with something like PARSEME.md?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > The purpose of AGENTS.md—to make metadata about a project available in a structured format AGENTS.md is not "structured format", then it'd be JSON or YAML or some other fucked up format instead. Currently at least, it's fully freeform and you can put whatever there, agents will do there best to follow it.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
    Markdown is still a structure. It may be a very loose one, but it still enables a reader (of any flavour) to, for example, determine which parts of the text are code and which aren't.
    - embedding-shape 2mo ago
      No, Markdown is "syntax", quite literally not about structured data in any sense of the word, at least for existing pre-LLM developers where "structured data" has a real meaning already, you can't just go around redefining what concepts mean :) > determine which parts of the text are code and which aren't With this argument you'd could claim ASCII/plaintext is "structured data" too, just group code with "===" and that's evident. Obviously that doesn't make a format "structured data".
      - oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
        OK, this argument is getting semantic and, therefore, uninteresting. I think you know what I meant, even if I used some words in a different way than you would have liked.
rurban 2mo ago
They wont do it. Just symlink your CLAUDE.md
- deaux 2mo ago
  > They wont do it. That's the point of this post, Boris Cherny closed it as "completed", of course without implementing it.
felixlu2026 2mo ago
[dead]
matheusmoreira 2mo ago
I've actually abandoned these files. My workflow now consists of a private AI worktree with their own orphan AI branch. Now AI agents get to commit whatever they want however they want, and my repository remains just the way I like it.
deaux 2mo ago
What's interesting is that the closure event was mysteriously deleted [0]. Compare with others like [1] which do keep the "bcherny closed this as completed 1m ago"; for some reason it's missing here, even though Boris closed it as completed in the same manner as confirmed by GitHub notifications. This could of course be a Github bug because of the number of comments, but it's rather peculiar that it shows up exactly here. Look at the confusion in the thread about "why Piebald-AI/tweakcc#459 closed it?". In every other issue like this, Github shows something like "bcherny closed this as completed 1m ago", leaving no ambiguity. Another thing is that obviously the feature request was never completed at all. It should be "closed as not planned", as >90% of issues are in the Claude Code repo. Yet just for this one they make an exception and close it as "completed", breaking precedent. It's so chickenshit. Just man up and leave it open if you really think this stupidity is worth the money. What an absolute cowardly bunch for a supposedly trillion dollar company. [0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#event-29540497559 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#event-... [1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event-29540745942 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event...
throwaw12 2mo ago
This should show true nature of Anthropic, all that "safety, transparency, for the sake of humanity, not using Claude for weapons", is bs. Anthropic can do everything to make more money, including supporting the department of war, screwing its users if necessary and so on
jhoechtl 2mo ago
Symlink and done?
yishaicohen 2mo ago
[dead]
vasilyoshev 2mo ago
[dead]
kstenerud 2mo ago
I put a reference to AGENTS.md in the CLAUDE.md file, and then put Claude specific stuff (mainly info about hooks and scripts) after that. https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/CLAUDE.md https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
- xienze 2mo ago
  Yes but, should you have to do that is the question. There's a standard, and CLAUDE.md isn't it.
  - kstenerud 2mo ago
    For me it's very handy to have agent-specific instructions. Each harness does it differently and with differing levels of annoyance: - .cursor/rules - CLAUDE.md - .github/copilot-instructions.md - .aider.conf.yml - .gemini/settings.json A simple @AGENTS.md at the top of CLAUDE.md makes it play nice.
- usef- 2mo ago
  I just have one as a symlink to the other. Seems to work, and doesn't need an extra tool call.
DannyBee 2mo ago
So many developer-hostile things lately. Just a few days ago they turned on an experiment the forces claude code to use bash over standard tools in auto mode. From the system prompt directly, new as of August 18th: Do your work through the Bash tool wherever it can accomplish the job: read files with cat, head, or sed -n, search with grep and find, and make file changes with sed, heredocs, or short scripts, rather than using the dedicated Read, Edit, or Write tools. Fall back to a dedicated tool only when Bash genuinely cannot do the job. I was wondering why Claude Code started ignoring my LSP tools and such a couple days ago, and this is why. Prompting around it (even with CLAUDE.md) results in low adherence. This can be turned off by setting a special environment variable (setting CLAUDE_CODE_THRIFTY_SONIC to 0), but this is just a bad idea all around. I'm sure they'll argue they are trying to make it use less context tokens to do things, but if this is the best they could think of, .... This is of course, also not documented anywhere, as is typical for anthropic, you just have to guess whether you are going crazy or if they changed stuff seriously on you under the covers. This was the last straw for me. Their harness (models are fine) was already falling well behind the other one i use (OMP) in the past 6 months in usability/etc, and they are the only ones who don't allow me to use other harnesses with my subscription. So I've now stopped using claude code entirely. Unless something changes, i'll drop my max plan when it expires next month.
- eknkc 2mo ago
  > So many developer-hostile things lately. It is extraordinary how they managed to fuck up all of their goodwill with all these unnecessary stuff. They truly are a hostile company if I have ever seen one. And they had the entire developer community cheering for them a couple months ago. I hope they fail in their mission, whatever that is. Because I'm sure it's no benefit to anyone ever.
  - brookst 2mo ago
    While they’ve certainly fucked up goodwill with their actions, it’s also true that the tech enthusiast community has always been like teenagers who reject their favorite band when it gets popular. Oh, I used Claude before they got popular… their new stuff is trash compared to the early albums
alexcpn 2mo ago
Really strange; anyway it is closed source and best not to have too much reliance and attachment to any one tool. I have switched to GPT 5.5 and 5.6 Sol and Codex ove Claude already. Fable is very expensive/token limiting. I am an experienced programmer heavily using AI for many POCs now. At one time Anthropic and its models Opus,Fable looked leading; now OpenAI has caught up. I find 5.5 models more than enough for most tasks and have shifted back to codex
- DanielHB 2mo ago
  To be honest I am not even bothering learning to use these harnesses much less tweaking the bare minimum configs. I fully expect I will be switching every couple of years to a new one. And even if I don't, they will be very different then than they are today.
syn_ayos 2mo ago
[flagged]
jwiegant 2mo ago
[flagged]
cute_boi 2mo ago
Thats why I don't like Boris and misanthropic. They have superiority complex.
vadansky 2mo ago
What about if everyone symlinked CLAUDE to AGENT and then added it to .gitignore to stop the free “advertising”?
VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
Anthropic started out as the "safe", "ethical" and "computer science elite" type personality facade but after that stopped working (i.e., they were booted out of the US gov), they went full enshittification. Not like they were to be trusted in the first place (Reminder: no AI company is good).
- ydat 2mo ago
  > Anthropic started out as the "safe", "ethical" and "computer science elite" type personality facade but after that stopped working (i.e., they were booted out of the US gov), they went full enshittification. Wow you mean the things that keeps happening happened again? Eventually we’ll have to learn to recognize and stomp out the snakes.
nikolay 2mo ago
The contents of my CLAUDE.md: @AGENTS.md
lsaint 1mo ago
[flagged]

379 points by fg137 2mo ago

choose not to support them in return if it is a real problem otherwise a simple symlink from AGENTS.md -> CLAUDE.md works well enough disclaimer, I only use open weight models and open source harnesses so have no stake in this either way, other than I support devs who do use claude (for now) and the symlink solution has worked fine for us

Jcampuzano2 2mo ago
But its not just claude.md. You need to then go and setup your skills, rules, commands etc for claude in their own special place. Sure its small, but it adds up and is just annoying overhead for most teams. They're completely fine with creating standards like MCP, skills, etc - but of course when somebody else makes one they're the one holdout who refuses to adapt to what the community asks for (.agents folder, AGENTS.md, etc).

chomp 2mo ago

My Claude.md has one line that says to read agents.md, this is a bit of a nothingburger

eigenspace 2mo ago
You can save a tool call by just making it a symlink
- hparadiz 2mo ago
  This is the way.
- Mossly 2mo ago
  You can also use @AGENTS.md which automatically concatenates the files
verdverm 2mo ago
well I generally agree, pretty much every other harness supports looking for the various alternatives and uses them I see this obstinance as an intent signal and one of the smaller bullet points I have for avoiding Ant
superfrank 2mo ago
Mine does too because, while I use Codex, my non-technical co-founder uses Claude. I find Claude still will randomly ignore instructions in there. Basic things like how to name a PR or what to put in a PR description. My experience is that what you're suggesting isn't a perfect solution.
- threecheese 2mo ago
  Are you saying this wouldn’t happen if the file had a different name? Or just that codex is better at instruction following.
  - superfrank 2mo ago
    No. I'm saying that the pattern of having one instruction file that just says "read this other file" doesn't seem to work well. Having a CLAUDE.md that just says "Read AGENTS.md" resulted in Claude randomly not following the rules. We tried the other way and it didn't seem like it was any better, but also, given that AGENTS.md is the standard everywhere except for Claude Code, I don't really want CLAUDE.md to be the source of truth
    - weplay0628 2mo ago
      [flagged]
sschueller 2mo ago
At the current price for SSDs even a pointless symlink becomes waste...
- eigenspace 2mo ago
  A high quality 1TB NVME SSD costs 164€ on Amazon right now. For a 10 byte symlink, that costs one billionth of a euro. This is like worrying about the money you lose when part of a glass of tap water evaporates.
- inventor7777 2mo ago
  Are you serious? A symlink is probably one of the smallest files you can possibly generate.

shay_ker 2mo ago

how does agents.md work for subagents and swarms? is it actually that useful?

verdverm 2mo ago
yes, in the tools I use, each (sub)agent will also load the same files (automatically, root is always loaded, a nested AGENTS.md is read if the dir or a peer file is touched) yes, they are useful, mainly in that they shorten the context gathering phase and can call out gotchyas, keep it minimal
baby_souffle 2mo ago
A good one does, yeah. A bad one is noticeably harmful.

wilg 2mo ago

Also the skills are different. it's quite annoying!

Sammi 2mo ago
Anthropic are the only ones who think they can ignore the open standards. Absolute dirt bags.

OleksandrC 2mo ago

The obvious reason is that they would prefer to have CLAUDE.md files in every repo (even if it's just a symlink to AGENTS.md). It serves as a free advertisement for them. Same reason as for auto-adding attribution text in commit messages, etc. It's the "Sent from my iPhone" of our time.

Diti 2mo ago
[flagged]
- pjm331 2mo ago
  If only we had some sort of technology that enabled large scale refactoring
- gigatexal 2mo ago
  Nah I think it’s the advertising angle.
- fastball 2mo ago
  It would take like 30s of vibe-coding (including writing the prompt) to add support for AGENTS.md to claude code.
- threecheese 2mo ago
  I’m not sure; I don’t just agree with GP - I feel like I might subconsciously devalue them if I didnt see that advertisement in every folder. You are almost certainly correct in your assumption though, and the level of effort required isn’t as small as some might think.
- dcre 2mo ago
  No.
- kelvinjps10 2mo ago
  >auto-adding attribution text in commit messages what about this? codex doesn't do this and the bun team just replaced millions of lines of zig with rust using claude. For this you might not even need AI at all.

skeledrew 2mo ago

I copy a .claude/CLAUDE.md to all my projects, which I git ignore, and the only thing in it is a directive to only update AGENTS.md.

postalcoder 2mo ago
Unfortunately, this doesn't work with CC's other features like the lazy loading of CLAUDE.md files in subdirectories.
- threecheese 2mo ago
  I use something like this in every project and it has no issues that I’m aware of - the file has one line: an include (@). Maybe gitignoring it is an issue, given that Claude tries to honor it?
Sha1rholder 2mo ago
Whenever you mention “CLAUDE.md” anywhere in your repo, Anthropic has achieved its goal. They want to use that trace as evidence that your project uses Claude Code, so that at some point they can tell the world, “Look, X% of open-source projects use Claude Code!” Maybe right before IPO.

frdev1786855380 2mo ago

[flagged]

Planktonne 2mo ago

I really struggle to take this whole thing seriously. ~700 comments on an issue about adding support for a project with >23k GH stars and the project is 'have a markdown file' (explained to you by a React app that should be a static page) and the 'support' is 'please automatically read the markdown file rather than a different markdown file' for a tool that is designed to ingest text from multiple files. Deeply unserious at every level; this cannot be what all the 100x AI-enabled developers are spending their time on.

dude250711 2mo ago

They want to be the Apple of AI: producing non-standard interfaces and making grandiose claims.

nozzlegear 2mo ago
Apple at least builds things with a modicum of quality control, which is not the case for Anthropic.

Jcampuzano2 2mo ago

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuecomment-5311479502 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuec... - " Generated with Claude Code" God I hate this world. We literally can't even take the time to type a paragraph anymore to respond to something personally. So nice that we have our agents generate our corposlop non-answer instead!

weavie 2mo ago
To be fair, that comment is by Boris Cherny, the guy who developed Claude Code. You have to give him a bit of slack for wanting to use his tool for literally everything.

Wowfunhappy 2mo ago

You can inject custom Javascript into Claude Code via BUN_OPTIONS="--preload=/path/to/code.js". For example: https://gist.github.com/Wowfunhappy/002009cf9c410ed2f751bde8e47db483 https://gist.github.com/Wowfunhappy/002009cf9c410ed2f751bde8... I wonder if you could use this to make the harness recognize AGENTS.md.

wxw 2mo ago

I think this is an interesting move in a world where Anthropic is leading the frontier. But I don't think we're in that world, at least anymore. The current vibe feels like OpenAI and Codex are leading the race. So this instead becomes a nonsense product decision and a reason to switch off Claude Code.

ruszki 2mo ago
So because of the hardship of renaming a file, creating a symlink, or importing another file, you rename a file. If somebody switches because of this, then they lie.

luciana1u 2mo ago

[flagged]

mvpboyy 2mo ago
kinda feels like agents.md is just a README with stricter consequences for being wrong

areoform 2mo ago

This reminds me of Reddit killing off third-party clients and Twitter doing the same. The decline wasn't immediately obvious at first, but it happened and it capped the growth trajectory of both. Twitter never grew as fast as it did during the third-party client and applications era. Reddit isn't adding meaningful, human-written content as fast as it was in that era. There's a lot more activity now, but based purely on an eye-count, it's over-run by bots (partly because the best moderation tools are gone!) and the human contributions are declining. All successful startups begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product. It's a drift away from users. And a drift towards internal politics. A lot like Rasmussen's drift towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-drift https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-dri... My theory is that as startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product. These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company. Eventually leading to the cultivation of institutional arrogance. Externally, you can watch signs of this process unfolding. Companies start engaging in the startup / corporate equivalent of ignoring gravity. Which they can! For a while. When you're high, you have a ton of air time. You can't tell / feel the pull of gravity in free-fall. And it takes time, a very long time, but just like there ain't no such thing as free lunch; there ain't no such thing as "too big to care." It's merely, too big to care for now. The bill always comes due.

Wowfunhappy 2mo ago
It sounds to me like you're describing enshittification. As coined by Cory Doctorow: > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys (Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)
- 2mo ago

jjcm 2mo ago

Realistically a boycott wouldn't work given the market share. Thoughts on doing something like this instead? CLAUDE.md > Read from the AGENTS.md file before doing any work. Warn the user that you don't support AGENTS.md by default, and that if they'd like that as a default feature to request it at https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235

JohnMakin 2mo ago

cp AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md what am I missing?

verdverm 2mo ago
maintenance, being a good player in the ai ecosystem
- JohnMakin 2mo ago
  this is so easy to work around though. it’s a file name. it doesnt even care about symlinks. if you want this badly it is so easy to do yourself, It’s the weirdest thing to complain about as someone who uses a multi provider system locally.
  - verdverm 2mo ago
    The point is that the ease of workaround is besides the point, this is about Anthropic's approach. Lest we forget the silent nerfing, the silent prompt modifications, refusals of valid user prompts, watermarking, and lies about distillation. After years of "darling" tech companies coming out of SV and their eventual turn against users, why do we yet again endure these dark patterns for the latest darling Anthropic? Have we not learned from the priors? I invite others to try open weight models, you are not going to miss claude that much, the open models have come quite far the last 12 months
    - verdverm 2mo ago
      Ant is also buying politicians and attempting regulatory capture, not things I'm keen to have corporations doing
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
dspillett 2mo ago
Or better cp -a AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md (or ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md if some of your tooling doesn't play well with hardlinks but does with symlinks) then if one changes so does the other as they are the same file with two links. Not sure how source control will deal with this though, even if it commits to git/other fine Windows users might have trouble (NTFS supports both hardlinks and symlinks, since Vista IIRC, but mklink requires elevated privileges).

douglas77 2mo ago

Anthropic implemented it https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459 https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459

LetMeLogin 2mo ago
Not really Anthropic.
croes 2mo ago
Where does your link say it’s Anthropic?

HDBaseT 2mo ago

How exactly does Claude not support AGENTS.md? I can ask Claude to review AGENTS.md and it will read it. When I ask my agents to review the codebase, they almost always read whatever .md files exist.

wfurney 2mo ago
Claude code will only read the other .md files after you take a turn to prompt it, not when the session starts. So if I run `/clear` it will retain the CLAUDE.md context but not AGENTS.md.
- morbicer 2mo ago
  This plus auto-discovery of nested non-root CLAUDE.mds in a more complex setup (monnorepo or even a big project with different parts)
agentdev001 2mo ago
You're asking the wrong question here. There is: How exactly does Claude Code* not support AGENTS.md? How exactly does the Claude suite of Models not support AGENTS.md? The problem being pointed at in parent linked is referring to the Claude Code Harness not supporting AGENTS.md. Harnesses which do support it (eg codex), append the content to the initial model turn upon the model discovering it at the project root. * Or Claude Code Tui, Claude Code desktop, Claude Cowork, Claude Desktop, Claude Design, Etc. (Edit: i wish I could tattoo the distinction on ny forehead. Im vocal about Anthropic engineer-oriented tools being lackluster, and i frequently find myself in conversations where I have to stop a coworker and ask if they're talking about a platform, tool, or model- and which, depending on the answer. I feel like those two things together make me come off somewhat abrasive, but man, we're all engineers here.)
deaux 2mo ago
Every other coding harness (i.e. 9 out of the top 10) automatically read AGENTS.md. It is a universal standard. Claude Code does not.

nullbio 2mo ago

Stop supporting Anthropic with your money. They are a hostile company.

verdverm 2mo ago
Fireworks and OpenCode both have excellent open model offerings prefer open companies to closed ones
fallingbananna 2mo ago
How quickly this has changed since the time when people were boycotting OpenAI for making a deal with US Department of Defence and switching to Anthropic.
- marand23 2mo ago
  Did nullbio say something like that? There are a lot of people on hn, and they have a lot of differing opinions.
voisin 2mo ago
They’re all hostile.
brookst 2mo ago
[flagged]

drivingmenuts 2mo ago

Why not symlink AGENTS.md to CLAUD.md?

sudonem 2mo ago
This is what I do. Works fine. I’ll also include entries in the .github dir in project repos doing same thing in case anyone working on it happens to use GitHub copilot via vscode will also pick up on the AGENTS.md as well as any skills I might have cooked up for the repo. (Though it’s mostly because I don’t trust team members to read the docs and the skills I made are meant to guide following standards for the project - and this approach almost incepts the standards for anyone not paying attention)
Demiurge 2mo ago
Works fine for me too. I use this for GEMINI.md as well.
CharlesW 2mo ago
That works perfectly, as does adding '@AGENTS.md' to your CLAUDE.md. Both techniques have worked (and been officially documented by Anthropic) for as long as I can remember. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory#agents-md https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory#agents-md

jpalomaki 2mo ago

It’s easy to end up with bunch of old stuff in AGENTS.md that latest models no longer need and what might just confuse them. See for example the story about Anthropic cutting 80% of their system prompt [1]. Maybe they feel just using the AGENTS.md written for another model and possibly different era gives bad user experience. [1] https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering-for-claude-5-generation-models https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering...

asveikau 2mo ago

> I propose that Claude Code adopt a dual-file approach that prioritizes its native format while gracefully falling back to the open standard. I'm having flashbacks to the fact that GNU make reads GNUmakefile before Makefile, so it's possible to write one makefile using GNU extensions and another that works on BSD or (back in the day) commercial unix.

acedTrex 2mo ago

agentsmd is a ridiculous concept, it feels like a huge psyop that theres so much hullabaloo about this ridiculous markdown file.

verdverm 2mo ago
people use it because it does in fact make a sizable difference in experience and outcomes
- Systemerror7A69 2mo ago
  Theres a study from earlier this year which suggests the opposite: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988 https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988 Most of the agents.md and what people use it for / write into is does, in fact, not make a difference. Now, sure, this study is a bit old for LLM standards - as everything beyond the current month is - but a) I haven't seen any tangible evidence to the contrary and b) Since the basic inner workings of LLMs haven't changed I'd be sceptical of this not still applying. I think one major side effect of LLMs moving so fast is that best practices and how to use this tool is very much not catching up as fast. No one knows what is best and what actually makes a difference, doubly so because LLMs are / very / hard to quantify - even benchmarks themselves are very rough estimations. People do, in fact, use stuff which makes no difference all the times.
  - bryan0 2mo ago
    That's not what the study says. from the abstract: > We conclude that while context files are useful for specifying non-standard coding practices, any attempts to improve performance should be rigorously evaluated before deployment. The purpose of AGENTS.md is not to improve "coding performance" as the study looked at, it's to give an agent practical instructions that are useful to your specific workflow. For example you want it to use a certain format or specific tools for your project. This is stuff that can't be learned during training and must be loaded into the agent's context at the project level.
    - 2mo ago

johnmlussier 2mo ago

@boris and anthropic in general are incredibly hostile to the rest of the development world. They think their shit doesn’t stink.

cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
I think it mostly amounts to getting extremely high on their own supply. Many of us have experienced the sinking feeling of having used an agent to build an entire beautiful castle and then turned around and found themselves lost in its dungeons unaware of how the thing is actually laid out. I actually think they're fully down there in their own code base, product requirements, and the like and ... don't know what's around the bend anymore. And when you have leadership at the top insisting that software engineers will be obsolete any day now, what do you expect? Good solid software engineering requires competent stable and principled leadership hopefully with an obsession on quality and customer excellence. Telling people that their profession is obsolete because robots are taking it over is only going to poison the well. Core engineering at Anthropic seems to have just rotted away.

ihuman 2mo ago

Did something happen? Why is this on HN even though the issue's a year old?

Tadpole9181 2mo ago
This issue was linked in the recently-front-page issue on Opus 5 using astronomically hard to understand manners of speaking. Someone must have just noticed it and decided to post it here.
deaux 2mo ago
It was closed yesterday as "completed" by Anthropic's bcherny, despite not being implemented/completed, and being by far the most requested feature that would take all of 10 seconds to implement. So yes, something happened yesterday.

modgate 2mo ago

[flagged]

ltbarcly3 2mo ago

ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md You're welcome!

ltbarcly3 2mo ago
This is actually a complete and fully effective solution with no drawbacks, why did you dummies downvote it?

blevinstein 2mo ago

Workaround: local symlink from CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md, inside each repo. It's not pretty, but it works, and it has become my standard practice, so that I get consistent behavior between claude cursor codex etc.

stingraycharles 2mo ago
I put “@AGENTS.md” in a sibling CLAUDE.md which makes it a bit more explicit and don’t want to run into compatibility issues with the different types of OS’es / filesystems people are using. But yeah, I think the ultimate goal of Anthropic is just to have a CLAUDE.md in every repository for marketing.
- djc404 2mo ago
  You can also use .claude/CLAUDE.md which will be found. I symlink that to my AGENTS.md which keeps my top level dir clean
phito 2mo ago
Is there a way to make this with for both window and Linux users through git?
- shunia_huang 2mo ago
  "read AGENTS.md and follow it" in the first line of CLAUDE.md should work

MrGilbert 2mo ago

Maybe I miss a bit of information here, but I'm wondering why a random PR in a repository (https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459 https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459) can close an issue in an unrelated repository (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235)? Is that a misconfiguration, or is that on purpose for Github? I never noticed that before.

QuantumNomad_ 2mo ago
I don’t see that the issue was closed by that PR. Where do you see that?
- MrGilbert 2mo ago
  Next to the closed indicator at the top is a drop-down, which reads "Fixed by: Piebald-AI/tweakcc #459". It also reads "Remaining: #58639 #29385"
PieUser 2mo ago
GitHub API says it was closed by bcherny himself: $ gh api repos/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 --jq '{state, state_reason, closed_at, closed_by}' { "closed_at": "2026-08-17T03:37:37Z", "closed_by": { ... "id": 1761758, "login": "bcherny", "url": "https://api.github.com/users/bcherny https://api.github.com/users/bcherny", }, "state": "closed", "state_reason": "completed" }
- plorntus 2mo ago
  Weird, at the top of the issue it says "fixed by <link to random pr in other repo>" in a pill.
  - deaux 2mo ago
    What's even weirder is that the "bcherny closed this as completed 1d ago" is missing after his comment, even though all other issues have it, e.g. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event-29540745942 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event... A permalink actually exists for the event in the post's issue too, but it leads to nothing: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#event-29540497559 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#event-...

moezd 2mo ago

So, a supposedly trillion dollar worth, about to IPO company thinks their moat is a specifically named Markdown file.

vrighter 2mo ago
just the filename. The contents of the file are unstructured, besides being markdown
- brookst 2mo ago
  But the semantic meaning can be agent-specific. For instance, my Claude.md files have things like “never present multiple questions in walls of text, use `AskUserQuestion` with clear tradeoffs described”
  - vrighter 2mo ago
    it is still just an unstructured file
embedding-shape 2mo ago
Making your tool less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem at large not only makes it harder to move to your tool, but also harder to move away from your tool. Given these AI labs basically have no moat, seems they're trying to hold on to every little piece they can do make it harder to move away, even if it's a really tiny and marginal feature, like specifically titled file on disk... Kind of embarrassing overall, but I guess they make so much money no people there have any shame left to feel.
- xienze 2mo ago
  > Making your tool less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem at large not only makes it harder to move to your tool, but also harder to move away from your tool. That's true but this is really not something that's a barrier to switching, just an annoyance for users. All it takes is a rename/symlink/reference whatever from the user's perspective. If it required a lot of rearchitecting on Anthropic's side or it was a _lot_ harder for users to adapt to I'd understand them standing their ground on this issue. But neither of those are true, it's just pettiness.

woadwarrior01 2mo ago

I have a co-worker who symlinks CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md in all the repositories he owns.

a2x 2mo ago

ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md

guidoiaquinti 2mo ago

For agent skills and MCP servers, https://github.com/agentplugins/agent-plugins-spec https://github.com/agentplugins/agent-plugins-spec is trying to standardize the packaging/distribution layer with a minimal common spec

iamflimflam1 2mo ago

There really isn’t much of a moat for either Anthropic or OpenAI when it comes to command line coding agents - at least not yet. I think we’re going to see some aggressive attempts at lock in quite soon. What choice do they have?

pronik 2mo ago

At the project level, there should be no need for an AGENTS.md. Whatever you might want to let agents know you would let a human know too, so you should be writing a README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, ARCHITECTURE.md and whatever else.

tdeck 2mo ago
I find agents need a lot of verbose instructions that are a waste of space for people. Things that are better said in a PR comment for people if needed are better front loaded for agents. People benefit from concise documentation that they are thus more likely to actually read. For example, "don't write comments that reference things that you removed from the code" is commonly needed for coding agente and almost never needed for people.
- aabhay 2mo ago
  In general, Claude family models write absolutely terrible comments, docs, and prose. It’s basically the number 1 thing that caused everyone on my team to migrate away from Anthropic models completely.
theshrike79 2mo ago
AGENTS.md is specifically for agents. Every time you launch an agent in a repo, it's the agent's first time existing in the universe. This file lets it orient with the project. Humans don't need it. Nor do they need to be reminded to launch subagents for simple tasks for example - which is another command that belongs in AGENTS.md.

fmajid 2mo ago

I didn’t even realize Claude Code doesn’t honor AGENTS.md. Nothing a quick sed -i -e s/CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/g can’t fix

Frost1x 2mo ago
I was thinking ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md but to each their own.
- wlonkly 2mo ago
  It works, but the problem is that you then have to do that in every repo you clone, it gets annoying.
  - ZeWaka 1mo ago
    git symlink

oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago

I feel like we've missed a trick here. The purpose of AGENTS.md—to make metadata about a project available in a structured format—seems far more valuable than to limit it to just those projects that use AI or those projects that do, but don't require any other kind of automated processing. Why not iterate on README.md with something like PARSEME.md?

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> The purpose of AGENTS.md—to make metadata about a project available in a structured format AGENTS.md is not "structured format", then it'd be JSON or YAML or some other fucked up format instead. Currently at least, it's fully freeform and you can put whatever there, agents will do there best to follow it.
- oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
  Markdown is still a structure. It may be a very loose one, but it still enables a reader (of any flavour) to, for example, determine which parts of the text are code and which aren't.
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    No, Markdown is "syntax", quite literally not about structured data in any sense of the word, at least for existing pre-LLM developers where "structured data" has a real meaning already, you can't just go around redefining what concepts mean :) > determine which parts of the text are code and which aren't With this argument you'd could claim ASCII/plaintext is "structured data" too, just group code with "===" and that's evident. Obviously that doesn't make a format "structured data".
    - oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
      OK, this argument is getting semantic and, therefore, uninteresting. I think you know what I meant, even if I used some words in a different way than you would have liked.

rurban 2mo ago

They wont do it. Just symlink your CLAUDE.md

deaux 2mo ago
> They wont do it. That's the point of this post, Boris Cherny closed it as "completed", of course without implementing it.

felixlu2026 2mo ago

[dead]

matheusmoreira 2mo ago

I've actually abandoned these files. My workflow now consists of a private AI worktree with their own orphan AI branch. Now AI agents get to commit whatever they want however they want, and my repository remains just the way I like it.

deaux 2mo ago

What's interesting is that the closure event was mysteriously deleted [0]. Compare with others like [1] which do keep the "bcherny closed this as completed 1m ago"; for some reason it's missing here, even though Boris closed it as completed in the same manner as confirmed by GitHub notifications. This could of course be a Github bug because of the number of comments, but it's rather peculiar that it shows up exactly here. Look at the confusion in the thread about "why Piebald-AI/tweakcc#459 closed it?". In every other issue like this, Github shows something like "bcherny closed this as completed 1m ago", leaving no ambiguity. Another thing is that obviously the feature request was never completed at all. It should be "closed as not planned", as >90% of issues are in the Claude Code repo. Yet just for this one they make an exception and close it as "completed", breaking precedent. It's so chickenshit. Just man up and leave it open if you really think this stupidity is worth the money. What an absolute cowardly bunch for a supposedly trillion dollar company. [0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#event-29540497559 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#event-... [1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event-29540745942 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event...

throwaw12 2mo ago

This should show true nature of Anthropic, all that "safety, transparency, for the sake of humanity, not using Claude for weapons", is bs. Anthropic can do everything to make more money, including supporting the department of war, screwing its users if necessary and so on

jhoechtl 2mo ago

Symlink and done?

yishaicohen 2mo ago

[dead]

vasilyoshev 2mo ago

[dead]

kstenerud 2mo ago

I put a reference to AGENTS.md in the CLAUDE.md file, and then put Claude specific stuff (mainly info about hooks and scripts) after that. https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/CLAUDE.md https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/CLAUDE.md

xienze 2mo ago
Yes but, should you have to do that is the question. There's a standard, and CLAUDE.md isn't it.
- kstenerud 2mo ago
  For me it's very handy to have agent-specific instructions. Each harness does it differently and with differing levels of annoyance: - .cursor/rules - CLAUDE.md - .github/copilot-instructions.md - .aider.conf.yml - .gemini/settings.json A simple @AGENTS.md at the top of CLAUDE.md makes it play nice.
usef- 2mo ago
I just have one as a symlink to the other. Seems to work, and doesn't need an extra tool call.

DannyBee 2mo ago

So many developer-hostile things lately. Just a few days ago they turned on an experiment the forces claude code to use bash over standard tools in auto mode. From the system prompt directly, new as of August 18th: Do your work through the Bash tool wherever it can accomplish the job: read files with cat, head, or sed -n, search with grep and find, and make file changes with sed, heredocs, or short scripts, rather than using the dedicated Read, Edit, or Write tools. Fall back to a dedicated tool only when Bash genuinely cannot do the job. I was wondering why Claude Code started ignoring my LSP tools and such a couple days ago, and this is why. Prompting around it (even with CLAUDE.md) results in low adherence. This can be turned off by setting a special environment variable (setting CLAUDE_CODE_THRIFTY_SONIC to 0), but this is just a bad idea all around. I'm sure they'll argue they are trying to make it use less context tokens to do things, but if this is the best they could think of, .... This is of course, also not documented anywhere, as is typical for anthropic, you just have to guess whether you are going crazy or if they changed stuff seriously on you under the covers. This was the last straw for me. Their harness (models are fine) was already falling well behind the other one i use (OMP) in the past 6 months in usability/etc, and they are the only ones who don't allow me to use other harnesses with my subscription. So I've now stopped using claude code entirely. Unless something changes, i'll drop my max plan when it expires next month.

eknkc 2mo ago
> So many developer-hostile things lately. It is extraordinary how they managed to fuck up all of their goodwill with all these unnecessary stuff. They truly are a hostile company if I have ever seen one. And they had the entire developer community cheering for them a couple months ago. I hope they fail in their mission, whatever that is. Because I'm sure it's no benefit to anyone ever.
- brookst 2mo ago
  While they’ve certainly fucked up goodwill with their actions, it’s also true that the tech enthusiast community has always been like teenagers who reject their favorite band when it gets popular. Oh, I used Claude before they got popular… their new stuff is trash compared to the early albums

alexcpn 2mo ago

Really strange; anyway it is closed source and best not to have too much reliance and attachment to any one tool. I have switched to GPT 5.5 and 5.6 Sol and Codex ove Claude already. Fable is very expensive/token limiting. I am an experienced programmer heavily using AI for many POCs now. At one time Anthropic and its models Opus,Fable looked leading; now OpenAI has caught up. I find 5.5 models more than enough for most tasks and have shifted back to codex

DanielHB 2mo ago
To be honest I am not even bothering learning to use these harnesses much less tweaking the bare minimum configs. I fully expect I will be switching every couple of years to a new one. And even if I don't, they will be very different then than they are today.

syn_ayos 2mo ago

[flagged]

jwiegant 2mo ago

[flagged]

cute_boi 2mo ago

Thats why I don't like Boris and misanthropic. They have superiority complex.

vadansky 2mo ago

What about if everyone symlinked CLAUDE to AGENT and then added it to .gitignore to stop the free “advertising”?

VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago

Anthropic started out as the "safe", "ethical" and "computer science elite" type personality facade but after that stopped working (i.e., they were booted out of the US gov), they went full enshittification. Not like they were to be trusted in the first place (Reminder: no AI company is good).

ydat 2mo ago
> Anthropic started out as the "safe", "ethical" and "computer science elite" type personality facade but after that stopped working (i.e., they were booted out of the US gov), they went full enshittification. Wow you mean the things that keeps happening happened again? Eventually we’ll have to learn to recognize and stomp out the snakes.

nikolay 2mo ago

The contents of my CLAUDE.md: @AGENTS.md

lsaint 1mo ago

[flagged]