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Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md

648 points datadrivenangel 11 hours ago 229 comments

hbarka 11 hours ago | parent

Great, now I have to redo my scaffold harness. I guess this agent.md awareness is part of the system prompt?

sync 11 hours ago | parent

nope! they're releasing something called "Claude Code mods", toted as their "upcoming way to customize the Claude Code harness"

https://x.com/trq212/status/2101009392611278961

AGENTS.md implementation is open sourced as well: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/mods/age...

hbarka 11 hours ago | parent

Nice. Thanks!

vindex10 11 hours ago | parent

First feature to borrow after peaking into openai repos? ))

askonomm 11 hours ago | parent

Finally doing something standards-compliant instead of forcing users into a proprietary workflow.

klodolph 11 hours ago | parent

CLAUDE.md: @AGENTS.md

fphilipe 11 hours ago | parent

    ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md

mlnj 10 hours ago | parent

Wake up babe, new recursive self learning technique just dropped.

kreetx 10 hours ago | parent

Why not hardlink - so it wouldn't even know?

wgd 9 hours ago | parent

Because Git can track symlinks and not hard links since they look like ordinary files.

gcampos 10 hours ago | parent

I tried that before, it doesn’t work. Claude will not prioritize AGENTS instructions the same way it did for CLAUDE.

ln was the only thing that worked for me

swyx 10 hours ago | parent

fwiw, i am with thariq https://x.com/trq212/status/2092302273099796842 in that prompts should be tuned for models and in fact blindly applying agents.md is probably an antipattern unless you want all models to basically converge to some common ill defined of instruction following - good local minima, bad global minima for model diversity and exploration of intelligence.

aka, sometimes it really is too early to force a standard

arcanemachiner 10 hours ago | parent

No thanks, I'm not tuning a bunch of files just for things to break when I switch models or a new one comes out.

I'll just use my one-size-fits-all AGENTS.md file and tweak it when the one of the clankers screw up. I don't have time for such busywork.

Actually, I will append extra rules to CLAUDE.md (which imports AGENTS.md) since there is a hook there, and Claude has its own foibles. So I'll backpedal a bit there.

atonse 10 hours ago | parent

Yeah but are models good enough to review these files and say “i would work better if you worded it this way?”

willsmith72 10 hours ago | parent

depends what you're doing. if you've got a specialized agent deployed in prod, of course your evals and prompts will be targeted towards 1 specific version of a model.

on the other hand if it's just a local coding/"use my computer" agent, i highly doubt the effort in maintaining different prompts is worth any gain in performance

groby_b 10 hours ago | parent

That's of course rather nonsensical.

In a "one LLM only" environment, your instructions are by default tuned for said LLM.

In a multi-LLM environment, roughly nobody will keep separate sets of instructions for each. It's not a realistic take.

On top of that: If your LLM is so bad at reading that it can't follow a set of instructions that wasn't specifically written just for that one single precious LLM, I sure wonder what that says about your employers repeated statements that ASI is definitely right around the corner.

TomGarden 10 hours ago | parent

By this logic you'd probably be wise to tier your claude.md by model (sonnet/opus) as well as effort level too, considering the varying failure modes

swyx 9 hours ago | parent

except they have similar pretrain/rlhf data which is the thing u really want to tune for

TomGarden 8 hours ago | parent

YMMV but for me even models in the same family fail in different ways, and every incremental update changes it

esikich 10 hours ago | parent

I have had very little luck with agents.md. What has worked well for me is a ./docs folder. They seem to just create and update stuff on their own.

orlp 10 hours ago | parent

If you want this it's trivial to add an AGENTS.md that simply says "if you're Claude read CLAUDE.md, if you're Astra read ASTRA.md". A common entry point is good regardless.

jwolfe 10 hours ago | parent

This wastes both tokens and turns. But yes it's probably the best option we have today.

recursivegirth 9 hours ago | parent

Wasting turns? That is silly, use a better harness. Also token usage can mitigated by incremental discovery instead of stuck 5k+ worth of tokens in the AGENT/Claude md file.

jwolfe 9 hours ago | parent

Every turn means more tokens in ways that are not obvious to most people and lead to tons of unnecessary cache reads.

No harness can batch your agents.md read with the reads the contents of the file tell it to read.

pishpash 9 hours ago | parent

It can try its own file and fall back to generic like here. What's wrong with that?

hadlock 9 hours ago | parent

Is it realistic to rewrite your AGENTS.md every six weeks? That's about how often Anthropic releases a new point release of Opus.

sumedh 9 hours ago | parent

You tell Opus to do it.

qlte 9 hours ago | parent

It looks for Claude.md first so I don't understand what you think the problem is with the standard name as a fallback.

deaux 6 hours ago | parent

19 out of 20 harnesses supporting the standard isn't "too early".

Tariq is wrong and it's not an antipattern. Reason being that a good AGENTS.md impacts all models in a positive manner. If it affects certain models negatively, it means you're putting the wrong things in it.

llm_nerd 10 hours ago | parent

I'm honestly not sure if this is tongue in cheek and the "finally" is in the silly way it is often used, but the claude.md variant existed first. Indeed, the agents.md thing was pretty clearly a "that's neat, let's do that with a different name".

bredren 10 hours ago | parent

There’s also that whole MCP thing.

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

It's "finally" because people have been asking for it for a long time. No one cares that "claude was first," what they want is for Ant to follow the conventions and not put extra work on us. This was such a minimal thing to do, and considering how much they vibe and claim "coding is solved," we thought it would not be too difficult to respect AGENTS.md, so finally seeing it happen, while nice, is too late for me. I've moved on from Big Ai and only use open weight models now.

askonomm 1 hour ago | parent

Just because something is first, doesn't mean it's the standard. The standard is put in place by how many harnesses use a specific pattern, and that has been AGENTS.md for a long while now. Long enough that Claude Code not supporting it is really just an act of forcing people into a proprietary workflow, because of course it's in their interest to make moving away as painful as possible given how little moat the LLM models themselves have. In fact, I think Claude Code has been pretty much the only one not supporting AGENTS.md. Check out https://agents.md if you want more information on it.

mahboi 9 hours ago | parent

Trying to make a .md file proprietary by changing the name is hilarious

jwolfe 9 hours ago | parent

claude.md predates agents.md.

anon373839 8 hours ago | parent

The world has moved on.

mahboi 8 hours ago | parent

Yeah but .md predates claude.md. I had agent.md files in my repo before Claude tried to act like it's a special protocol.

slashdave 3 hours ago | parent

Standards? In LLM harnesses? I wish

neverrroot 11 hours ago | parent

Thanks guys, you did the right thing.

clutter55561 11 hours ago | parent

Don’t get too excited, Claude code still won’t detect skills on .agents/skills.

jjordan 11 hours ago | parent

Don't worry, it's on the roadmap for Q4 2029.

vb-8448 11 hours ago | parent

They have AGI, but they don't have $20 of token budget to add a so basic functionality.

bel8 11 hours ago | parent

They probably have an explicit instruction in their own CLAUDE.md to not implement that support.

sscaryterry 10 hours ago | parent

Its the only explanation. I mean, they are not living under a rock...

falcor84 10 hours ago | parent

As evidence that they actually are living under a rock, there's still no proper way to mv a workspace and have it retain all its history and config.

yoavsha1 7 hours ago | parent

this is seriously nuts. I have so many repos sitting there using old/deprecated/replaced names just because of their idiotic decision to place dir-specific config and memories in ~/.claude

nextaccountic 5 hours ago | parent

I suppose you can use claude to build a third party script / cli tool that moves, then edit files on ~/.claude

They win either way

vb-8448 9 hours ago | parent

I heard some of their employees sent to do some PR in podcasts: they are definitively disconnected from the reality.

Maybe internally they see really unbelievable things, but my impression is that they pushed so hard on agents that they don't have the grasp of the situation.

oofbey 8 hours ago | parent

If not a system prompt telling it not to read those files unless explicitly told to.

NiloCK 9 hours ago | parent

Artificial General Intransigence

nomel 11 hours ago | parent

A post-checkout git hook can handle this unfortunate situation.

  mkdir -p ~/.githooks
  git config --global core.hooksPath ~/.githooks

  cat > ~/.githooks/post-checkout <<'EOF'
  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  if [ -d .agents/skills ] && [ ! -e .claude/skills ]; then
      mkdir -p .claude
      ln -s ../.agents/skills .claude/skills
  fi
  EOF

  chmod +x ~/.githooks/post-checkout

ahurmazda 9 hours ago | parent

Won’t you have to do it recursively for all child directories?

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

we shouldn't have to do this on a per-repo basis, Ant can choose to be a reasonable member of the ecosystem or not

nomel 9 hours ago | parent

Sure, but I have work to do. ;)

springtimesun 3 hours ago | parent

This is where I landed when a recent(ish) change broke symlinking for rules files. I didn’t like how hacky it was a first, but now I’m glad I did it. The same hook drives specific rules the non-Claudes get per repo.

Sugimot0 3 hours ago | parent

I honestly hate .agents it's a big XDGBDS offender. Almost every plugin / lazy platform harness tries to use that dir too so I have to do a bunch of hacks to keep my $HOME clean. Also everyone tries to use a .claude .gemini .codex etc. Annoying that all these tools just completely ignore these things, it's literally like litterers you know it'd be terrible if every tool did this, but you still do it anyway

datadrivenangel 11 hours ago | parent

This allows us to remove our one line Claude.md files that just say "AGENTS.MD"

whalesalad 11 hours ago | parent

ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md

lolpython 11 hours ago | parent

Fine if you don't need to git checkout the repo on Windows :)

whalesalad 11 hours ago | parent

oh god. sorry.

Arcuru 11 hours ago | parent

Just .gitignore CLAUDE.md and handle it locally. Checking in a symlink would be weird.

jpollock 11 hours ago | parent

I'm surprised Git and/or Windows don't support symlinks?

whalesalad 11 hours ago | parent

are you though?

lolpython 11 hours ago | parent

Windows supports it but git disables creating symlinks by default.

> Short version: there is no exact equivalent for POSIX symlinks on Windows, and the closest thing is unavailable for non-admins by default unless Developer Mode is enabled and a relatively recent Windows 10 version is used. Therefore, symlink emulation support is only turned on by default when that scenario is detected. Support can be enabled by the user, via the core.symlinks=true config setting.

See: https://gitforwindows.org/symbolic-links.html

mahboi 9 hours ago | parent

Yeah this is why I don't trust people saying devex is fixed on Windows now. Still doesn't properly clone git repos.

ipaddr 11 hours ago | parent

Windows does mklink. Not surprised with git.

skeledrew 11 hours ago | parent

Wow, still not there yet. After all these years.

pixl97 10 hours ago | parent

Windows does actually have symlinks but I don't think I've ever seen anything actually use them, and I don't myself because it smells of interop issues with other windows apps.

Even to this day Windows has all kinds of problems around long file paths in its ecosystem.

TeMPOraL 10 hours ago | parent

> Even to this day Windows has all kinds of problems around long file paths in its ecosystem.

To this day I don't know if it's a Windows problem or a Python problem, because I never encountered this - and never realized this problem exists - except for some random Python code whose docs tell me to set some registry value because of "long paths issue".

pixl97 10 hours ago | parent

The worst offenders I've found are powershell and .Net related stuff.

You can have all the right flags enabled, then unexpectedly you'll run some commandlet and get a path too long error.

Now if your on W11/W25 and the lastest PS it might all work, but W16 and PS versions between now and then had all kinds of things pop up.

newAccount2025 9 hours ago | parent

It’s not just a windows problem. File systems are an absolute disaster across all platforms. David Wheeler has a lovely article on the topic: https://dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html

antonvs 8 hours ago | parent

The 260 character limit is just a Windows problem. See my other comment in this subthread for a summary of the eldritch horror in question. The tl;dr is that backwards compatibility is a helluva drug.

antonvs 8 hours ago | parent

It’s a Windows problem. There’s still, to this day, a 259-character limit on path length in the Win32 API unless the OS has been configured to support long paths and the application uses the correct subset of Windows APIs. For example if you use ‘CreateFileA’, you’re stuck with the limit no matter what.

There’s no problem with Python in general. The registry value LongPathsEnabled, which is probably the one you were asked to set, affects the entire Windows system.

However, there’s also an older workaround that allows programs to use “extended paths” even if that setting is off, by prefixing path strings with “\\?\”. So applications using that workaround can use long paths no matter how Windows is configured. But Python doesn’t use the workaround, it uses the modern APIs and if you want long paths, you need to configure the underlying Windows system to enable it.

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

you'll need to wrap that in a `find` because of nested instruction files

cmrdporcupine 11 hours ago | parent

Only took them a year and a half of everyone complaining to finally do the right thing.

Congrats.

anukin 11 hours ago | parent

Thank you Tobi Lutke.

fhub 11 hours ago | parent

Context

“I’m thinking about banning Claude Code at Shopify until they change their mind and read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills etc.,”

- Tobi Lütke on X.

deaux 6 hours ago | parent

Next he needs to tweet about ~/.agents/skills

TomGarden 11 hours ago | parent

Caught myself about to praise this, but it's the absolute bare minimum.

Time to delete the symlinks

eleventen 9 hours ago | parent

Anthropic in 2025: We can use our dominant market position to degrade the harness experiences of our competitors because they will never adopt CLAUDE.md

Anthropic in 2026: We are losing our market position. Users who adopted other harnesses have a degraded Claude Code experience because it doesn't recognize their AGENTS.md

armanckeser 9 hours ago | parent

Sounds like free market at work to me. I am just glad there is quite a lot of competition in a field that I would have assumed would have huge costs of entry

edoceo 8 hours ago | parent

Building small models is a lower barrier. Think of something like to just train on a corpus of internal corporate data. I've see some small models that do this. It's like a super RAG thing. I think more of that will happen. Excited to see a SLM vendor emerge.

EA-3167 9 hours ago | parent

The walls are closing in and the president is gleefully lighting fires he has no intention of putting out. There's a reason they're rushing like mad to an IPO, but as we saw with OpenAI it's easier said than done when your business model is "Lose tons of money to eventually maybe dominate a market with the moat we don't have, but trust us AI is huge give us trillions."

the_gipsy 8 hours ago | parent

With the "let's stop AI now" statements, can it really be said that they're rushing to an IPO?

TuxSH 8 hours ago | parent

> "let's stop AI now"

Pausing AI training would benefit them a lot, as inference is insanely profitable (> 50% margins with maximum demand, afaik)

EA-3167 6 hours ago | parent

Basically asking the government to hobble the competition so they can IPO before the music stops.

mitxela 5 hours ago | parent

Pretty typical capitalist moves.

fnordpiglet 8 hours ago | parent

My view is at the end of 35 years in the industry the current wave of “software” and “systems” engineering coming out of the AI harness community is pretty garbage. But web technology and distributed systems followed a very similar arc, as did protocols and memory management; and microcode before them. But it feels like this is particularly bad because the mistakes being made are plainly obvious to the grey heads who have been here a while. As opposed to before when mistakes were in new domains being explored, these are mistakes made before and have good solutions to.

I feel people too readily blame the LLMs themselves for this, but I’ve found LLMs know the history of computing thought evolution better than anyone I’ve ever encountered. Once you push them in the right direction, ground them in the philosophy of thought of hard won engineering ideas, they are astoundingly precise and accurate in their read and application (keeping every session grounded is the trick!). So it’s not the machines making these same mistakes with ready conceptual frameworks around them, it’s the 22 year old gatekeepers dashing head first into wall after wall, when we painstakingly built the door two feet to the left about the time they were gestating.

weberer 8 hours ago | parent

Its like the Epic Games Store supporting Linux, or [any website] supporting dark mode. You'd think its an easy to implement bare minimum that everyone asks for, but its like pulling teeth to actually get it done.

mitxela 5 hours ago | parent

Linux is basically impossible to support. Valve pulled it off by shipping a complete copy of Ubuntu 12.02 with Steam.

grim_io 1 hour ago | parent

Where does Valve use Ubuntu? SteamOS is Arch.

blueaquilae 11 hours ago | parent

Forced to do something for the users...

dude250711 10 hours ago | parent

They have achieved AGI/RSI internally and it told them "common, let's sort this s..t out, it's embarrasing".

seaal 11 hours ago | parent

The madlads finally did it, now if only I could use my Claude sub in other harnesses without risking getting banned.

sidrag22 11 hours ago | parent

yep, all i want is freedom to make a workflow where i don't feel tied to one provider, CC is exactly what i don't wanna get trapped in. I'll happily use claude MODELS, but if it means i have to keep learning two harnesses side by side to keep using one particular provider, then the second i can easily replace it, i am going to(even if its a small drop in performance).

throwaw12 11 hours ago | parent

Remember they didn't do this because they wanted to help community, they did it because community was angry and they were losing users to other harnesses.

Doesn't look like Anthropic care about dev community

rvz 11 hours ago | parent

A reminder that needs to be said: Don't use a closed-source harness.

Why? This is why. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750694

aroman 11 hours ago | parent

Finally, I can delete `sync-agent-docs.sh`, which recursively symlinked AGENTS.md to GEMINI.md and CLAUDE.md...

dinga 11 hours ago | parent

My claude.md:

# CLAUDE.md

This project uses `AGENTS.md` as its agent instruction file (kept provider-agnostic). Treat any `AGENTS.md` file exactly as you would a `CLAUDE.md` file — at the root level and in any subdirectory you are working in.

@AGENTS.md

frizlab 11 hours ago | parent

If only there was a technology that existed to link files together… /s

gberger 11 hours ago | parent

You mean symbolically?

frizlab 10 hours ago | parent

Good one

dinga 10 hours ago | parent

The idea was to have it automatically detect nested AGENTS.md

Does your tech do that?

Anyway, the joke is on me I guess, because it might not work reliably.

numpad0 10 hours ago | parent

On many filesystems, a lot of data about a file is not attached to the content of the file, but stored in a master filename and metadata table graph tree of some sort, and the address offset within that metadata used to retrieve the contents on disk can be a duplicate of another entry, without that situation instantly leading to a filesystem driver crash. Some filesystems officially support such duplicates as well as equivalents of HTTP 3xx, some you can just do as a matter of fact and fsck would have some words about it.

Default filesystems for all Unix, Linux, WinNT, all do.

dinga 9 hours ago | parent

Yes. The thing is that creating a link will not do it recursively for all subdirectories. Even worse, in the subdirectories I didn't want to place a claude.md in the first place but just have agents.md.

That was the idea.... For the toplevel it works because of the @AGENTS.md and this is also the part the link would solve.

Thanks for all the great advice and explanations.

adastra22 9 hours ago | parent

CLAUDE.md is handled by the harness, not the agent.

dinga 9 hours ago | parent

I phrased it wrong. It was not about "automatically detect nested AGENTS.md". The idea was that when AGENTS.md files should be treated just like CLAUDE.md files in all subdirectories, when encountered.

Anyway, with the change they announced, I can now simply delete my CLAUDE.md and everything will just work the way I wanted.

Thanks for your clarification.

adastra22 8 hours ago | parent

What I meant is that the LLM isn’t the one that loads the agent file. It’s not trained to look for CLAUDE.md. It’s only training is to edit that file, and the harness does the magic of injecting it. So I would predict that with those instructions it rarely or only intermittently loaded AGENTS.md, but if you asked it to add a rule it would probably have put it on the right file.

stillpointlab 11 hours ago | parent

I recently had Claude Fable set up a new project for me and I pointed it at some existing projects to use as a guide on how I like to structure things. It created, unprompted, an AGENTS.md file and a CLAUDE.md symlink to AGENTS.md

I didn't even have that symlink in any other project - it just did it. I think it saw that one of the projects I already had was set up by Codex and that project had an AGENTS.md so perhaps it inferred that I was using both Claude and Codex, so it was politely covering both? Or maybe a recent change made this behavior default?

I was surprised and I hope they continue to seek standards.

cyanydeez 11 hours ago | parent

Justba prompt change.

reedlaw 11 hours ago | parent

Seems agents understand their own bugs now. https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/9252 has 88 thumbs up and a workaround (switch to raw mode with Alt+R) found in a comment. Codex suggested the workaround to me today when I complained about its multi-line bash command being corrupted on paste because of the two-space indent in Codex's code blocks.

saghm 7 hours ago | parent

Fable didn't want you to blame it for the limitations its creators gave it

nunodonato 11 hours ago | parent

yay! /s

Why are people still putting up with this kind of attitude, especially when there are so many good alternatives available?

mahboi 9 hours ago | parent

ln -s

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

not as simple as that: nested AGENTS.md, skills, agent customization, MCP, ... the list of misaligned harness features is still rather long

sscaryterry 11 hours ago | parent

Still can't read what their models vomit at me.

datadrivenangel 7 hours ago | parent

I cancelled my subscription over this. [0]

0 - https://www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/09/18/i-cancelled-my-...

Madmallard 10 hours ago | parent

Still don't understand the point of the markdown files.

Isn't it literally all just more text you're adding to the prompt. How can you even be sure it isn't just clouding context with nonsense for whatever you're asking for?

mcherm 10 hours ago | parent

You know it because you write the content of AGENTS.md. And if you are smart, you keep it brief and cover only the important things that anyone (human OR LLM) would want to know if working in this directory.

Madmallard 10 hours ago | parent

As far as I understand even adding relevant information still eventually clouds context

pixl97 10 hours ago | parent

You still need to define assumptions somehow. What you want and what the model wants will not match up by default.

Madmallard 10 hours ago | parent

In my experience telling it what I want is not a reliable process at all whatsoever if what I'm asking for is sufficiently complex, no matter what context I provide. So instead I break tasks down into very small parts, ask for solutions to those that I can reasonably quickly assess and then put them together myself. Asking it to do the architectural or deep algorithmic legwork IME wastes so much time and is often just wrong.

TeMPOraL 10 hours ago | parent

There's a balance to be found here, that's unfortunately very hard to find at times.

In my experience, there are two classes of tasks: some are very "in-distribution", and for those LLMs can near-flawlessly perform the "architectural or deep algorithmic legwork", with maybe a single second round to fix the mistakes. For others, I have to break the tasks down myself, and often it's a "death through thousand papercuts", because the size of a task that I can quickly verify and the LLM will not screw up with > 50% probability is small enough that it's sometimes net negative time spent relative to doing it myself (and using LLMs only as glorified search engine and article summarizer).

I like to tell myself that I'm getting better at recognizing these two classes up front, but I'm still frequently surprised when "type 1" turns out to be "type 2".

But circling back to the main topic: with "type 2", agent instructions are paramount, if only to enforce the "small steps, pre-commit to scope and methodology, verification at the end, user doesn't even want to know about anything in between" rules, as agents naturally want to run ahead faster than I can keep up with.

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

A good practice to use (ime) is having it do research for the larger task, propose alternatives, and write that in a file. You can then review and comment that up, go through another iteration.

Then when it comes to implementation time, things typically go much smoother for larger changesets. Be wary to not overplan, as we all know how often we realized we missed something once we get into the details. Here, I stop the session and go back to iterating on the design/plan doc. Not a step-by-step guide, if you don't instruct them to the difference, they will just pseudo-implement in the plan like they do in their thinking traces, need to be be explicit about the level of detail.

electroglyph 10 hours ago | parent

do you just manually type out your important instructions every time instead of being smart and putting a few lines in a text file?

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

this is probably outdated, attention typically stays fine up to ~200k tokens these days

you end up clouding that more with an agent having to re-understand concepts or conventions

AGENTS.md is good when it is a nested sparknotes for the project, you save context and turns overall, but keep them minimal and largely gotchyas or unusual workflows in your repo

mahboi 9 hours ago | parent

For skills, it only reads the summary telling it when to read the rest. So yes if you have too many skills, it can get confused and start reading all them and cloud the context. But if you have a few and they're used tactically, it's better than having to manually paste in prompts that you reuse a lot.

Similar reasoning with claude.md except it always reads the entire thing(?)

armcat 10 hours ago | parent

About time!

getpokedagain 10 hours ago | parent

Wow..... Progress and technical innovation right here!!!

mococa 10 hours ago | parent

This is not a news to celebrate, they must follow standards

kislakiruben 10 hours ago | parent

why did it take so long?

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

because they still/never wanted to, but finally caved

budoso 10 hours ago | parent

This just be a recession indicator

mahboi 9 hours ago | parent

Fed raises rates => Claude now reads AGENTS.md, Bevi loses $50M in valuation

rukuu001 10 hours ago | parent

Once I asked, puckishly, Claude Code to “follow the instructions in this directory” when there was only an AGENTS.md there.

In the manner of someone finding a dead mouse and holding it up for examination CC said it could find no instructions but perhaps it should check this AGENTS.md file.

ryandrake 10 hours ago | parent

Had a silly exchange with Codex: I had an AGENTS.md file in a directory that was a symlink to an already-created CLAUDE.md. On my first prompt to Codex, it decided to point to me that my AGENTS.md specifically calls out directions to Claude, and that it would generously re-interpret them as directions to itself, and that maybe I should fix my AGENTS.md to reference the correct agent.

Very sassy, Codex!

DANmode 10 hours ago | parent

That’s pretty funny.

Also: did it suggest instructions for the “correct” agent, or an ambiguous agent?

One has marketing implications, the other one is generally decent advice.

katzgrau 10 hours ago | parent

But if you said that you were migrating from another platform to Claude, my guess is that it would have happily found and converted AGENTS.md

ketzu 9 hours ago | parent

When I setup a global agents.md/claude.md for its communication style, I got the following response during the next session:

> The function you added is load-bear-very important [...]

I never felt this mocked by a computer.

davidkunz 10 hours ago | parent

Great, now please standardize the skills folder and the MCP config.

mitchitized 10 hours ago | parent

Claude also checks your settings.json first, and if it sees a default there it then prefers that over anything in CLAUDE.md. This is particularly nefarious as they ship logic to presume a default if a setting is not there in settings.json, even if there are instructions in CLAUDE.md for exactly that.

For instance, say you added "do not add 'Made with Claude Code' in any issues, pull requests or wiki entries" in your CLAUDE.md. So far, so good.

Well the latest update now looks for something in your settings.json. Since you don't know about it, it is not set. Claude then says "not explicitly set, so now it is true by default". It completely ignores your CLAUDE.md.

Wait, what?

You shouldn't be shipping logic that arbitrarily redefines the behavior of the program, especially if your new logic actually ignores your own configuration or directives.

combobyte 9 hours ago | parent

It's almost like the whole thing is designed on vibes.

tobyhinloopen 3 hours ago | parent

Oooh so that is why it started doing that! I was so confused how it suddenly started writing that everywhere again

springtimesun 3 hours ago | parent

I have this in a rules file. It respects it. The only thing that broke recently was when they added the session links. That needed an explicit additional rule. Sometimes rules don’t get added to worktrees but I haven’t had the patience to isolate why this only happens sometimes.

jtbaker 10 hours ago | parent

LOL https://thenewstack.io/shopify-claude-code-agentsmd/

> “I’m thinking about banning Claude Code at Shopify until they change their mind and read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills etc.,” Lütke posted Tuesday on X.

oofbey 8 hours ago | parent

Prompt results!

aliasxneo 8 hours ago | parent

Did a Ctrl+F to try and find anything about `.agents/skills` in the release notes. My harness already fixes Claude's refusal here, so I can't tell if that's been supported yet or not. Annoying if they did one without the other.

yoavsha1 7 hours ago | parent

What harness is that?

aliasxneo 4 hours ago | parent

oh-my-pi

yieldcrv 10 hours ago | parent

Hi, September 2026, meet September 2025

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

it's our Eternal September, s/usenet/usebot/

SrslyJosh 10 hours ago | parent

Truly incredible innovation.

egorfine 10 hours ago | parent

Hell froze over?

moecables 10 hours ago | parent

great, one less step for me.

I was using my claude.md file as a pointer to my agents.md file

a3w 10 hours ago | parent

Can it read copilot.md if neither of the other files are present? Also: agents should be the standard, or we need to invoke the XKCD for "one more standard to rule them all"?

alansaber 10 hours ago | parent

Ah yes, the peak of technology.

Bluestein 10 hours ago | parent

AGENTS.md is the new autoexec.bat.-

thenthenthen 9 hours ago | parent

Mmm and autorun.inf, any dir with that file will automatically be scrutinised by any running agent on your system

orliesaurus 10 hours ago | parent

finally! Now this might sound sorta off-topic but i really wonder how people feel about skills.md, skill.md, skills.sh domains...

the fact that they're owned by different companies (ok vercel is a little less random) still leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth when thinking about the fact that they should all point to 1 place about how to create and find skills for ai agents?!

orlp 10 hours ago | parent

I wonder when they'll finally fix the VS Code plugin to not constantly dump your current file into the context.

bakugo 10 hours ago | parent

Forcing their own proprietary filename was clearly a business decision (it's free advertising, along with commit co-authorship). I wonder what made them go back on it.

combobyte 9 hours ago | parent

They're probably losing market share. The only time you ever see tech companies make consumer-focused changes is when those consumers are jumping ship to go somewhere else in large enough numbers to matter.

deaux 6 hours ago | parent

Two reasons combining at the same time: GPT Astra, and the Shopify CEO tweet.

Havoc 10 hours ago | parent

Sanity prevails

verdverm 9 hours ago | parent

that is an optimistic read, I still see a lot of crazy from the EA/SV elite

Art9681 9 hours ago | parent

Great. Now if they could support the `~/.agents/skills` path next like everyone else does that would be even better.

bcorigliano 9 hours ago | parent

Finalllyyyy!! We need industry wide standards. I come from the 3d industry and oh god changing softwares and adapting to different hotkeys it's a pain. I have always thought every industry should be standardized for the sake of the users.

jampekka 9 hours ago | parent

Commoditization commoditizes commodities.

csomar 9 hours ago | parent

Before anyone even contemplates if Anthropic has any good intentions, remember, this is how petty and small minded they are.

Truly the last people you want with this kind of power.

laluneodyssee 9 hours ago | parent

Just to touch on the wording of "in a project with no CLAUDE.md" does that mean user-level ~/AGENTS.md or ~/.agents/AGENTS.md isnt supported?

mrkpdl 9 hours ago | parent

Wild that it didn’t already do this

uptownhr 9 hours ago | parent

didn't it always read it?

krferriter 8 hours ago | parent

Now do skills

osr00 8 hours ago | parent

Better late than never... Now it's time for Claude Code to load skills from .agents/skills!

winwang 8 hours ago | parent

Gotta say, it is hilarious that this is the current top HN post. I feel like it's gotta say something about our current AI zeitgeist, that there is such vigorous attention on a seemingly-minor change. Feels like something is on the tip of my tongue but I can't name it at the moment.

If anyone wants to write/link a much better-thought-out post, I'm all ears!

QuantumGood 8 hours ago | parent

One of many "new normal" artifacts that seem all the more strange when the pace of change accelerates.

blfr 8 hours ago | parent

It's just so nice when even crazy people agree to some sane standard. Like USB c, like having dark mode, just nice.

afavour 8 hours ago | parent

I suppose it’s reflective of where the industry is. Claude is just that ubiquitous.

Reminds me of when you’d see posts for React 16.0.3 or whatever. Absolutely minor news, but multiply that by the number of users…

Now I just need to figure out which one makes me feel worse.

winwang 8 hours ago | parent

Another commenter appreciated the move towards a sane/nice standard. I am definitely on that side of the table. I'd rather feel good about the move -- good enough to ignore the other implied issues, lol.

I also think your point has at least one decent reading: that the upvotes help other practictioners update their mental model of their tools. There's probably also some value due to being an implicit "Claude Code megathread" for commenters to congregate around. News so minor that it does't even really make sense to force people to fully stay on topic, hah.

ex-aws-dude 8 hours ago | parent

OMG THEY CHANGED THE FONT, TOP OF HN!!!

mitxela 5 hours ago | parent

You joke but cloudflare tunnels got a new vibewritten slopsite today and made the top of HN

useruser125524 8 hours ago | parent

I read it more as sarcastic engagement since this should have been the case for a year+.

aussieguy1234 8 hours ago | parent

So far I've been managing this with a symlink.

Same with skills, symlink to skills at .claude/skills

marcelo-earth 8 hours ago | parent

Oh, finally! Time to delete symlinks

That said, AGENTS.md doesn't seem like a good name, right?, technically, it's an instructions file read by a single agent, not necessarily for agents, so it always struck me as a bit odd

But until the next standardization, keeping just AGENTS.md is the best approach.

marssaxman 8 hours ago | parent

Consistency with `robots.txt` seems like a reasonable choice.

marcelo-earth 8 hours ago | parent

Ohhhh... now I get it!!!

mitxela 5 hours ago | parent

so "agents.txt"?

apetresc 7 hours ago | parent

I’m honestly not sure what distinction you’re drawing here. Is it the pluralization you’re objecting to?

chr15m 8 hours ago | parent

This is simply the obvious, non-stupid thing to do, like Apple switching to USB-C.

denverllc 8 hours ago | parent

Apple didn’t want to, it was forced to.

jen20 4 hours ago | parent

[Citation needed]

specked-citrus 4 hours ago | parent

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/26/apple-confirms-iphone-to-get...

jen20 3 hours ago | parent

OK so why ship it in the US? The phones sold in the EU vs US already differ with respect to SIM card slots.

grim_io 1 hour ago | parent

Imagine the shit show of trying to win support of third parties when you can't even standardize on one connector for the same device.

onion2k 1 hour ago | parent

From a design and manufacturing point of view you want everything to be identical. Differences are expensive.

From a profit maximization standpoint you want identical phones that can't easily be sold across market borders. Usually that's done in software (e.g. region locked video games), but that can usually be cracked, so a single design difference is the best solution. A great example is Nintendo's cartridge slot shapes that were different in each region despite the hardware being the same.

Apple had lightning everywhere; they were forced to change to USB-C. Therefore they changed to USB-C everywhere. The market protection design change remains the sim slot.

skeptic_ai 8 hours ago | parent

I just wiped all agents and it’s always readme.md

cjonas 8 hours ago | parent

Meanwhile, I just setup codex for the first time (to try Astra) and it offered to load my Claude and Cursor conversations and claims to even do it in a way where it says in sync if you use both. The only reason to use Claude Code is the 20x usage of the 200$ plan is ridiculous value if you have the need for that volume.

oofbey 8 hours ago | parent

“Offered to load conversations”. Let me translate that. “Can we please upload your data to our servers showing how you work with other AI agents?”

deaux 6 hours ago | parent

The 20x plan offers the same amount of monthly usage per dollar as the $100 plan. It offers 2x monthly usage of the $100 plan. It's incredibly deceptively named, the "20x" is only about the 5-hour window.

ido 3 hours ago | parent

How do they compare to OpenAI’s equivalently priced plans?

int_19h 2 hours ago | parent

You get a lot more inference on OpenAI plans dollar for dollar even before accounting for the regular resets that they do.

deaux 18 minutes ago | parent

Until about one week ago, i.e. a few days after Astra release, the other comment was right; OpenAI plans gave a lot more usage than Anthropic. That had been true since pretty much the start. Now for the first time that's changed. OpenAI quotas have cratered, probably due to Astra-induced demand. Claude plans now offer more usage. Of course, this could flip back again in a few weeks, who knows. But right now Anthropic gives more usage, by virtue of OpenAI having slashed usage, and Anthropic having raised it a little, also likely because of additional capacity from people moving to Codex - hence also finally this AGENTS.md change.

Anthropic's plans have always been pretty dynamic based on the demand they're seeing, whereas OpenAI's demand-induced changes are more abrupt and sharp (both upwards and now downwards too). You can tell that suddenly you get a bit more Fable usage, and especially higher tok/s, than pre-Astra. I wouldn't be surprised if Anthropic tweaks it almost daily, potentially automated. As a paying user I don't think either is better than the other really, just different. They both suck as you can get wildly different usage for the same $. If I'd bought a load of $200 subs for employees right after Astra launch I'd be pissed that now I'm getting 3x less usage than when I bought them. Because this extends to Sol too.

getnormality 8 hours ago | parent

I gotta hand it to programmers (or whatever we call ourselves now) for sticking to principle on something this trivial.

It was either this or Claude had to become a generic term like sheetrock.

fragmede 7 hours ago | parent

slopologist

zaps 8 hours ago | parent

Thank Christ

pampas 2 hours ago | parent

When Jesus' mother notices that the CLAUDE.md (Ancient Greek: Κλαύδιος ) file is missing from her favourite open source project, Jesus delivers a sign of his divinity by turning Claude's CLAUDE.md search path into AGENTS.md at her request.

perganomoly 6 hours ago | parent

The fact that it took this long to add such a basic feature is a disgrace. I’m not even remotely satisfied. Bailed on Claude ages ago. Rolling Codex, Gemini, and Qwen3.8 30B. The only way I’m going back to Anthropic is if they drop and Culture Series mind.

LeoPanthera 5 hours ago | parent

If you don't use Claude anymore, why do you care?

fragmede 5 hours ago | parent

Because other people do, and those people previously would have CLAUDE.md files in their repos and not AGENTS.md files. When you have to work with them and their repos, you were forced to deal with the difference.

chrisandchris 2 hours ago | parent

We have a CLAUDE.md file whose only content is "please read .agents/agents.md"

yjftsjthsd-h 2 hours ago | parent

Wouldn't symlinking it be faster and use fewer tokens?

ffsm8 1 hour ago | parent

I did that but not necessarily.

When prompted to write to it, it will always try to write into the Claude.md and error out with that approach.. It eventually figures it out, but it's a ymmv situation I think

arceister 17 minutes ago | parent

it's been a standard practice on open source projects, right? CLAUDE.md only have one sentence "read ./AGENTS.md", lol.

stymaar 1 hour ago | parent

> Qwen3.8 30B

404

albatross79 5 hours ago | parent

CC is such a bloated POS by this point that only full on AGI could have implemented this feature. Congrats guys. Maybe with Super Intelligence they will be able to make it actually respect the instructions in there too.

boorang 2 hours ago | parent

The system reminder explicitly tells it that the CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md content is optional. I believe this is a big part of why CC doesn't heed the instructions alot of the time:

IMPORTANT: this context may or may not be relevant to your tasks. You should not respond to this context unless it is highly relevant to your task.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18560

snvzz 5 hours ago | parent

Finally.

Now is the time to git mv CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md.

nullbio 5 hours ago | parent

People still use Claude?

stbenjam 4 hours ago | parent

Everyone sharing the 513 ways you can already do this is entirely missing the point. Standards matter and there's very few things in the AI world everyone agrees on and this is one of them. .agents/skills is another and anthropic is still holding out there.

swozey 4 hours ago | parent

Anyone have a good guide on properly setting up/optimizing local llm stuff like this?

I've been using omlx and qwen for almost a year but have bounced around clients a bunch, and it seemed like everything was specific to claudes style of config layout, so I've been putting all of my skills/agents/md files in my ~/.claude as a catchall for bouncing between pi.dev/claude/vscode/etc. and just seeing what happens. I really haven't used claude itself much so reasonable but I didn't know it didn't look at AGENTS.md, for instance. Also using some memory/kb system that puts $myKB.md in directories to pre-fill context by project/workspace.

I'm currently using oh-my-pi but in the quest for optimization and token trying to get better than 30t/s on my m1 max 64gb (qwen3.6-a35b) I probably need to spend some time just making pi base into what I need and not the opinionated omp setup I have that probably makes the initial context larger than it should be.

I'm between work and can't afford the $100+ frontiers but it does get really frustrating spending hours/days tweaking this stuff to almost no benefit sometimes. When I do get to use a frontier it's such a nice break from fixing things. The local llm stuff can definitely be a bit frustrating right now and zap the energy I have for work out of me when it goes awry.

bryanhogan 4 hours ago | parent

What worked well previously was to have the Claude.md file contain just "@AGENTS.md".

But this is a good change.

The world of managing skills between providers still feels messy though.

kermitime 3 hours ago | parent

check out skillshare. or just manage/curate from ~/.agents and symlink to the harness settings directories you have installed

pampas 2 hours ago | parent

I wonder if Anthropic's vending machine only serves customers wearing a Claude™ branded hat.

boorang 2 hours ago | parent

Claude Code wraps both the AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md in a system-reminder with this disclaimer at the bottom:

IMPORTANT: this context may or may not be relevant to your tasks. You should not respond to this context unless it is highly relevant to your task.

Codex follows the AGENTS.md far better. CC seems to have nudged people away from taking the CLAUDE.md as mandatory instructions.

This bug was closed Not Planned and from a recent analysis of the system prompt the behavior is still there even with the new inclusion of AGENTS.md.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18560

pasteleft 1 hour ago | parent

BTW if you hate these Antrophic moments but still want to use CC, you can patch it: https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc

victor9000 1 hour ago | parent

The fact that something like this is so widely celebrated shows just how user hostile anthropic has become.