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.
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.
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.
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 Twitter situation was a bit different: I built the very first Android Twitter client which grew to millions of users. We later got acquired by TweetUp and I'm partly responsible for their strategy to acquire other popular clients, too. We basically owned 60%+ of the third-party market within months with the potential of 'migrating' a large portion to a new tbd Twitter competitor. Needless to say Twitter wasn't happy, and the rest is history. Never build on somebody else's turf.
> 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.
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.
(Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)
This pisses off businesses though. I guarantee you that multiple businesses will set up workflows with different AIs for orchestration as sold to them by OpenAI and Anthropic. Cue agents.md not working, "What do you mean the thing I'm paying this much per seat for doesn't play well with the other AIs?"
The consumers here are developers -- who are--> potential founders OR future purchase decision makers.
It's a TERRIBLE idea to piss them off just because they're small.
They're "small" right now. But quite a few of them will have long careers and they will remember.
It's why so many trad corp companies give stuff away to students for free / treat the people on the come up as first tier customers. Because those are future decision makers. And the turn table turntables.
A cautionary case study is Google. How many times does a founder who is considering which cloud service to use gets cautioned to never use Google Cloud?
Google Cloud was a has been before it ever got out of the gate because of just how much goodwill Google blew up over the years. There's nothing, literally nothing, they can spend money on to make that go away in the short-term. And they're not willing to commit to the long-term.
They finally killed the `old.reddit.com` subdomain for logged-out users this week, which was the final push I needed to stop even idly browsing. I've been using the site since at least the digg exodus in 2010.
Scrapers won't be stopped by needing an account; in the recent discussion [0] about this, someone mentioned that there's even a JSON API you can use - by appending .json to any post! It's to drive engagement... for the advertisers. They gotta keep the valuation up after the IPO.
I exposed this JSON API in the same style as their original API at api.reddiw.com and they banned my account without warning. I explicitly included my reddit username in the user-agent so that they could reach out if they had a problem with it. Nope, straight to banning my decade old account.
> They finally killed the `old.reddit.com` subdomain for logged-out users this week...
Is it a gradual shutdown? [0] works just fine for me, and I don't and have never had a Reddit account so I'm always logged out. I've visited a few of the comment threads on that page and they all display just fine.
I'm using Firefox on a full-sized computer (that is, not a phone or tablet). Do you get different results with Firefox on a full-sized computer, or is that your primary web browser?
> Somehow Reddit thinks I care enough about their content to set up an account and log in just to read it. They are mistaken.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it has more to do with the fact that I’m currently in Vietnam. I certainly get a lot of websites that give me extra hassle about accessing from here, or some simply refuse to load at all. Just try booking a domestic USA flight on Frontier Airlines or Southwest Airlines while currently being in Southeast Asia…
For what it’s worth, I’ve received this on my iPhone running safari. I almost never use Reddit, and when I do it’s usually because I’m casually browsing and someone linked to it, and for that type of usage I’m almost always on my phone. I can’t remember the last time I attempted to access Reddit on an actual computer. But I’m clearly not their target user, I simply don’t care about them enough to be willing to jump through any hoops.
I haven't been able to access old reddit for ages, but it is different now. Previously, they just gave me that obnoxious fedora-reddit-guy "whoa there pardner!" and some anti-bot message I think, but now it explicitly says "Log in to use old Reddit. To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit."
My Reddit account is 14 years old, I've decided to stop using the website and overwrite all historical comments with a protest message.
I honestly did not enjoy it anymore, almost all subs feel political these days (and the worst kind of politics, American politics ;)), the hive mind downvotes everything that it disagrees with (irrespective of the merit or quality of the message) and you get bans for seemingly everything if the mods disagree with you (/r/UnitedKingdom for criticizing the government motability scheme, /r/Europe for "rape belittlement" for a message in which I mentioned _war crimes_ such as rape. I guess calling it a war crime isn't serious enough...).
Glad to have ditched it! It's a shame there isn't a similar community like old Reddit but I guess we'll get one at some point!
I agree with you on this general pattern, but I don’t really see how it applies to Claude Code’s usage of claude.md specifically.
I believe Claude code has been using that file since before the agents.md standard, so it’s not really a business decision to be different. There are some potential rough edges with changing over now, and the best proposed solution in the GitHub issue could be a bit complicated and error-prone from a technical or security point of view.
I’m not saying I agree with the decision, I would certainly prefer if they standardized on agents.md, but I don’t really believe their lack of doing so is deliberate enshittification.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's more than that. They truly believe Claude Code to be a moat (both the harness and the posttraining) to be a moat.
I've been deeply distrustful of Anthropic from early early days. They have always been openly disdainful of user feedback. I would not be surprised if later they try to implement more shenanigans to keep people locked into CC.
Claude Code is quickly becoming an anchor. Every week I marvel at how much worse it gets, how much more essential information is hidden and replaced with bloated useless TUI and rambling tangential responses that hide the useful bits of info behind jargon invented by the agent without ever explaining it to the user.
It's like the PMs for Claude Code are reward hacking their own reinforcement learning.
I use it in a very basic way on the $20 plan and the code it produces seems alright (for the parts I care about) but I increasingly can't stand the way it "talks". I may actually change to something else entirely for this reason.
I have been happy with Claude Code lately, but I haven't explored other options much in over a year. Curious to try something else out if it's less rambling and tangential.
This is not necessarily a problem with the harness (IE, swapping from Claude Code wouldn't necessarily fix this).
If what you're looking to avoid is specifically 'rambling and tangential', you can get quite far with anything that adds directives to avoid those things, early in every context window. Ie, through use of Agents.md/claude.md, skills, hooks, and so on.
Changing model would also affect this. Fable 5, Opus 5, and Sonnet 5 are all going to average out to different levels of ramble. Openai, Xai, Google, etc; different providers models will also have different levels of ramble.
What Claude Code does take away from you is some level of control over what makes it into the context window. The system prompt which claude code append to the beginning of every session of course has measurable ramble-affect.
I quite like the Pi harness, most in part because important goal with the approach behind it is "give the user as much control over what makes it into the cotext window as possible."
Codex TUI is also good. Haven't touched it since moving to Pi however. Again- harness isnt the big "stop rambling" thing to change, tho.
The sub only works in Claude Code itself (unless they changed that rule again?), and all the Chinese models are trained on Claude Code (a bunch of them don't even work in Codex).
I use a custom harness, but I constantly hear good things about Pi.
EDIT: Checked out Pi and Oh-My-Pi. 250k LoC and 1.5M LoC respectively. Sheesh. How's that for minimalism...
Vendored in my own LLM micro library (100 LoC) so it's 150.[0]
There's no parallelism or anything, but I use it for surgical edits and it's much faster and cheaper than the official harnesses for some reason. (Absence of sysprompt bigger than my repo probably helps there...)
[0] This one uses OpenRouter so you can use it with any model, but jerry rigged Codex sub version available on demand :)
---
I also have a ultra turbo bloated version (500 lines... need to strip it down a bit!) which has autorun files (for grep-based context injection), notification (frog croak when agent done, etc.) Watch this space!
Shoot, yes. The user experience of logging in is the same, but yes- using a different (non-cc) harness bumps you up to the pay-per-token rates.
However! I have seen projects which use CC under the hood, in order to get the subsidized rates.
Writing comments which get me to go look through anthropic documentation, and find friction I wasnt aware of (CC does not have an app-server), refreshes my frustration towards anthropic.
Doing the whole “pay per token rate” when logging into a harness not made by them is not only being enforced by anthropic/claude though. It also is what Google does with agy (their TUI).
Is there any provider that doesn’t do this? That’s the one I want to support.
> TLDR: they are all probably doing it because they are banking on you not using all your tokens.
I would be surprised though, it makes business sense to make the default vendor native TUI cheaper because it’s understood that most nascent users will just use the harness offered by the LLM provider and those that would stray off that would probably be more power users who would spend their token share more consistently till it drains.
OpenAI allows you to use the subsidized limits outside of their products. I don't think they clearly "tell" the world that this is the case, but they do put out a product surface that- I dont think they would, if they didnt allow this usage.
Pi with Claude is better than Claude code in my experience. But I even use old GLM5.2 with pi and generally have a better experience than current Claude Code. It reminds me of peak productivity with Claude Code of 5+ months ago.
New guidelines that I have seen in a certain place is to configure and update existing CC setups to be CC/Codex agnostic. Plus setting up both allows Claude Code to delegate tasks [1] to Codex to reduce usage.
Oh my god, that's an official plugin. That's hilarious. I had the same idea last year, when I noticed how much cheaper GPT was for the same tasks, but Claude was still better as a high level "operator".
Also cause OpenAI was cool with you calling their sub in an automated way, but Anthropic very much was not (they were banning people at the time).
yeh i tried pi, as a neovim user i naturally like customizability, but with how little i use agents, i want something that just works, which opencode does for me.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.)
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.
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
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but since we are specifically talking about claude.md, Anthropic themselves claim on their website these files "serve[s] multiple purposes: providing architectural context, ..." (https://claude.com/blog/using-claude-md-files)
They also recommend starting with an /init command, which is also something the study very specifically called out as "having a marginal negative effect"
And from personal experience, I can only confirm that many people seem to see this as the main purpose of agents/claude md files - a persistent architectural overview of your project.
Quick Edit: My point simply being that I think it's understandable if some people don't understand the big deal about these files because they've had a drastically different experience than other people - anthropic themselves recommend apparently totally ineffective practices on their website, and the starter tool present in many harnesses seems to even have a (marginal) negative effect.
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)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
So, a supposedly trillion dollar worth, about to IPO company thinks their moat is a specifically named Markdown file.
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.
Why do people continue to use the word “moat” only in context of AI companies?
I don’t think that’s true? I’ve been here quite a while now and it goes back a long long time in the startup world
just the filename. The contents of the file are unstructured, besides being markdown
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.
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-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.
The Twitter situation was a bit different: I built the very first Android Twitter client which grew to millions of users. We later got acquired by TweetUp and I'm partly responsible for their strategy to acquire other popular clients, too. We basically owned 60%+ of the third-party market within months with the potential of 'migrating' a large portion to a new tbd Twitter competitor. Needless to say Twitter wasn't happy, and the rest is history. Never build on somebody else's turf.
> 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.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
My shorthand is builders vs extractors.
Companies start in Growth mode and as they get older investors demand they mature into Margin mode.
There’s a point where you have to start paying people back the money they gave you.
I’ve been in companies that have grown fast and then realised that their margins are very slim. It’s a very grim position to be in.
Great turnover - where’s the profit?
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
(Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)
The consumers here are developers -- who are--> potential founders OR future purchase decision makers.
It's a TERRIBLE idea to piss them off just because they're small.
They're "small" right now. But quite a few of them will have long careers and they will remember.
It's why so many trad corp companies give stuff away to students for free / treat the people on the come up as first tier customers. Because those are future decision makers. And the turn table turntables.
A cautionary case study is Google. How many times does a founder who is considering which cloud service to use gets cautioned to never use Google Cloud?
Google Cloud was a has been before it ever got out of the gate because of just how much goodwill Google blew up over the years. There's nothing, literally nothing, they can spend money on to make that go away in the short-term. And they're not willing to commit to the long-term.
Precisely. Anthropic was never good to its consumer users.
it's always been this way with Claude/Ant though, not something that changed
This is more SV modus operandi
Reddit is undergoing an even worse tragetory right now:
They're a lot heavier on the censorship and sidewide ban. Subs are being astroturfed as much or worse than usual.
On top of that they're trying to stop anonymous browsing by paywalling on a timer.
They finally killed the `old.reddit.com` subdomain for logged-out users this week, which was the final push I needed to stop even idly browsing. I've been using the site since at least the digg exodus in 2010.
They are also slowly killing /r/all ahead of the elections
you can still access old reddit by choosing on Settings → User Preferences → Prefer classic UI or something like that
As the gp says, only if you're logged in.
They are trying to stop scraping, I guess.
Scrapers won't be stopped by needing an account; in the recent discussion [0] about this, someone mentioned that there's even a JSON API you can use - by appending .json to any post! It's to drive engagement... for the advertisers. They gotta keep the valuation up after the IPO.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015533
I exposed this JSON API in the same style as their original API at api.reddiw.com and they banned my account without warning. I explicitly included my reddit username in the user-agent so that they could reach out if they had a problem with it. Nope, straight to banning my decade old account.
The company has turned evil sadly.
Well ya, but they have written posts to mods explaining that their long term goal is to limit scraping.
> They finally killed the `old.reddit.com` subdomain for logged-out users this week...
Is it a gradual shutdown? [0] works just fine for me, and I don't and have never had a Reddit account so I'm always logged out. I've visited a few of the comment threads on that page and they all display just fine.
[0] <https://old.reddit.com/r/mikrotik/>
It’s been broken for me for at least a week. When I click that link I get:
Log in to use old Reddit To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.
By continuing, you agree to our User Agreement and acknowledge that you understand the Privacy Policy
—
Somehow Reddit thinks I care enough about their content to set up an account and log in just to read it. They are mistaken.
I get the login wall too. Chrome (incognito)/Android/Pixel
Hmm.
I'm using Firefox on a full-sized computer (that is, not a phone or tablet). Do you get different results with Firefox on a full-sized computer, or is that your primary web browser?
> Somehow Reddit thinks I care enough about their content to set up an account and log in just to read it. They are mistaken.
Same here.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it has more to do with the fact that I’m currently in Vietnam. I certainly get a lot of websites that give me extra hassle about accessing from here, or some simply refuse to load at all. Just try booking a domestic USA flight on Frontier Airlines or Southwest Airlines while currently being in Southeast Asia…
For what it’s worth, I’ve received this on my iPhone running safari. I almost never use Reddit, and when I do it’s usually because I’m casually browsing and someone linked to it, and for that type of usage I’m almost always on my phone. I can’t remember the last time I attempted to access Reddit on an actual computer. But I’m clearly not their target user, I simply don’t care about them enough to be willing to jump through any hoops.
Doesn't work in Europe either -> full login wall, Desktop Firefox.
> I certainly get a lot of websites that give me extra hassle about accessing from here, or some simply refuse to load at all.
That's fuckin lame.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
I haven't been able to access old reddit for ages, but it is different now. Previously, they just gave me that obnoxious fedora-reddit-guy "whoa there pardner!" and some anti-bot message I think, but now it explicitly says "Log in to use old Reddit. To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit."
logged-out users have been blocked if using a VPN for a while.
It worked for me (from two French IP addresses in different ASs) for two or three weeks since people started talking about. Now it's gone too.
That link is giving me a login screen completely on desktop.
New reddit: Doesn't require a login Redlib: Doesn't require a login
My Reddit account is 14 years old, I've decided to stop using the website and overwrite all historical comments with a protest message.
I honestly did not enjoy it anymore, almost all subs feel political these days (and the worst kind of politics, American politics ;)), the hive mind downvotes everything that it disagrees with (irrespective of the merit or quality of the message) and you get bans for seemingly everything if the mods disagree with you (/r/UnitedKingdom for criticizing the government motability scheme, /r/Europe for "rape belittlement" for a message in which I mentioned _war crimes_ such as rape. I guess calling it a war crime isn't serious enough...).
Glad to have ditched it! It's a shame there isn't a similar community like old Reddit but I guess we'll get one at some point!
Actually, Reddit is a lot more dead than that right now. I would argue >90% of the content now is fake.
That is a big claim. I know some of it is because I have interviewed people who have described ~exploits building LLM redditors.
But >90%? Can you provide something that supports something in this ballpark?
I don’t think it’s 90%, but also - fake content doesn’t apply just to LLM generated content.
When you go the places which are clearly at the target of bots such as commercial products, geopolitical issues, and politics - the ratio becomes bad.
This is also true in hacker news, but the moderation team here is good enough in burying these topics away from the front page for the most part.
This is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy
I agree with you on this general pattern, but I don’t really see how it applies to Claude Code’s usage of claude.md specifically.
I believe Claude code has been using that file since before the agents.md standard, so it’s not really a business decision to be different. There are some potential rough edges with changing over now, and the best proposed solution in the GitHub issue could be a bit complicated and error-prone from a technical or security point of view.
I’m not saying I agree with the decision, I would certainly prefer if they standardized on agents.md, but I don’t really believe their lack of doing so is deliberate enshittification.
You can inject custom Javascript into Claude Code via BUN_OPTIONS="--preload=/path/to/code.js". For example: https://gist.github.com/Wowfunhappy/002009cf9c410ed2f751bde8...
I wonder if you could use this to make the harness recognize AGENTS.md.
Stop supporting Anthropic with your money. They are a hostile company.
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.
Did nullbio say something like that? There are a lot of people on hn, and they have a lot of differing opinions.
Fireworks and OpenCode both have excellent open model offerings
prefer open companies to closed ones
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Is there a way to make this with for both window and Linux users through git?
"read AGENTS.md and follow it" in the first line of CLAUDE.md should work
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?
> 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.
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.
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".
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-...
[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66955#event...
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
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
@boris and anthropic in general are incredibly hostile to the rest of the development world. They think their shit doesn’t stink.
For agent skills and MCP servers, https://github.com/agentplugins/agent-plugins-spec is trying to standardize the packaging/distribution layer with a minimal common spec
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's more than that. They truly believe Claude Code to be a moat (both the harness and the posttraining) to be a moat.
I've been deeply distrustful of Anthropic from early early days. They have always been openly disdainful of user feedback. I would not be surprised if later they try to implement more shenanigans to keep people locked into CC.
Claude Code is quickly becoming an anchor. Every week I marvel at how much worse it gets, how much more essential information is hidden and replaced with bloated useless TUI and rambling tangential responses that hide the useful bits of info behind jargon invented by the agent without ever explaining it to the user.
It's like the PMs for Claude Code are reward hacking their own reinforcement learning.
I use it in a very basic way on the $20 plan and the code it produces seems alright (for the parts I care about) but I increasingly can't stand the way it "talks". I may actually change to something else entirely for this reason.
What tools do you find are better?
I have been happy with Claude Code lately, but I haven't explored other options much in over a year. Curious to try something else out if it's less rambling and tangential.
> less rambling and tangential
This is not necessarily a problem with the harness (IE, swapping from Claude Code wouldn't necessarily fix this).
If what you're looking to avoid is specifically 'rambling and tangential', you can get quite far with anything that adds directives to avoid those things, early in every context window. Ie, through use of Agents.md/claude.md, skills, hooks, and so on.
Changing model would also affect this. Fable 5, Opus 5, and Sonnet 5 are all going to average out to different levels of ramble. Openai, Xai, Google, etc; different providers models will also have different levels of ramble.
What Claude Code does take away from you is some level of control over what makes it into the context window. The system prompt which claude code append to the beginning of every session of course has measurable ramble-affect.
I quite like the Pi harness, most in part because important goal with the approach behind it is "give the user as much control over what makes it into the cotext window as possible."
Codex TUI is also good. Haven't touched it since moving to Pi however. Again- harness isnt the big "stop rambling" thing to change, tho.
The sub only works in Claude Code itself (unless they changed that rule again?), and all the Chinese models are trained on Claude Code (a bunch of them don't even work in Codex).
I use a custom harness, but I constantly hear good things about Pi.
EDIT: Checked out Pi and Oh-My-Pi. 250k LoC and 1.5M LoC respectively. Sheesh. How's that for minimalism...
Mine's 50. (Lines.)
https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/bd50aaa4bdb15f9a4cc8176ee3...
Vendored in my own LLM micro library (100 LoC) so it's 150.[0]
There's no parallelism or anything, but I use it for surgical edits and it's much faster and cheaper than the official harnesses for some reason. (Absence of sysprompt bigger than my repo probably helps there...)
[0] This one uses OpenRouter so you can use it with any model, but jerry rigged Codex sub version available on demand :)
---
I also have a ultra turbo bloated version (500 lines... need to strip it down a bit!) which has autorun files (for grep-based context injection), notification (frog croak when agent done, etc.) Watch this space!
They did walk that back, you are able to use an Anthropic login in a non-anthropic harness. (For now.)
(Edit: I failed too mention, using a different harness with a CC/Anthropic subscription bumps you up to the pay-per-token rate.)
Yeah and it bills extra usage? Or did they walk that back too.. gotta keep the customers on their toes!
Shoot, yes. The user experience of logging in is the same, but yes- using a different (non-cc) harness bumps you up to the pay-per-token rates.
However! I have seen projects which use CC under the hood, in order to get the subsidized rates.
Writing comments which get me to go look through anthropic documentation, and find friction I wasnt aware of (CC does not have an app-server), refreshes my frustration towards anthropic.
Doing the whole “pay per token rate” when logging into a harness not made by them is not only being enforced by anthropic/claude though. It also is what Google does with agy (their TUI).
Is there any provider that doesn’t do this? That’s the one I want to support.
I would be surprised though, it makes business sense to make the default vendor native TUI cheaper because it’s understood that most nascent users will just use the harness offered by the LLM provider and those that would stray off that would probably be more power users who would spend their token share more consistently till it drains.OpenAI allows you to use the subsidized limits outside of their products. I don't think they clearly "tell" the world that this is the case, but they do put out a product surface that- I dont think they would, if they didnt allow this usage.
This is... close. They offer ways to leverage openai subscription directly for 3rd party app use. https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/app-server
Pi with Claude is better than Claude code in my experience. But I even use old GLM5.2 with pi and generally have a better experience than current Claude Code. It reminds me of peak productivity with Claude Code of 5+ months ago.
New guidelines that I have seen in a certain place is to configure and update existing CC setups to be CC/Codex agnostic. Plus setting up both allows Claude Code to delegate tasks [1] to Codex to reduce usage.
Most are easy to share with symlinks and @agents.
https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc
Oh my god, that's an official plugin. That's hilarious. I had the same idea last year, when I noticed how much cheaper GPT was for the same tasks, but Claude was still better as a high level "operator".
Also cause OpenAI was cool with you calling their sub in an automated way, but Anthropic very much was not (they were banning people at the time).
T3 Code if you want to use your subscriptions in an interface that respects its users.
Not OP but I like OpenCode a lot. But OhMyPi: https://omp.sh/ is also taking off. Personally I didn't like it as much as OpenCode.
yeh i tried pi, as a neovim user i naturally like customizability, but with how little i use agents, i want something that just works, which opencode does for me.
Ironically, I think Claude Code is shit, especially after I started to get used to Pi.
It has a sort of first mover advantage, but I wouldn't be surprised if basically any harness is superior to that crap.
Except I actively despise that commit message anytime I see it.
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?
They wont do it. Just symlink your CLAUDE.md
> They wont do it.
That's the point of this post, Boris Cherny closed it as "completed", of course without implementing it.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work with CC's other features like the lazy loading of CLAUDE.md files in subdirectories.
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?
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#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!
I have a co-worker who symlinks CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md in all the repositories he owns.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
This plus auto-discovery of nested non-root CLAUDE.mds in a more complex setup (monnorepo or even a big project with different parts)
They want to be the Apple of AI: producing non-standard interfaces and making grandiose claims.
Apple at least builds things with a modicum of quality control, which is not the case for Anthropic.
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) can close an issue in an unrelated repository (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235)?
Is that a misconfiguration, or is that on purpose for Github? I never noticed that before.
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", }, "state": "closed", "state_reason": "completed" }
Weird, at the top of the issue it says "fixed by <link to random pr in other repo>" in a pill.
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...
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-...
I don’t see that the issue was closed by that PR. Where do you see that?
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"
how does agents.md work for subagents and swarms? is it actually that useful?
A good one does, yeah.
A bad one is noticeably harmful.
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
Also the skills are different. it's quite annoying!
Anthropic are the only ones who think they can ignore the open standards. Absolute dirt bags.
ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md
every tool ships its own instruction file and somehow the actual standard is still the README everyone half-reads and forgets to update
kinda feels like agents.md is just a README with stricter consequences for being wrong
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
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).
Did something happen? Why is this on HN even though the issue's a year old?
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.
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.
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.
agentsmd is a ridiculous concept, it feels like a huge psyop that theres so much hullabaloo about this ridiculous markdown file.
people use it because it does in fact make a sizable difference in experience and outcomes
Theres a study from earlier this year which suggests the opposite: 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.
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.
Yes, but since we are specifically talking about claude.md, Anthropic themselves claim on their website these files "serve[s] multiple purposes: providing architectural context, ..." (https://claude.com/blog/using-claude-md-files)
They also recommend starting with an /init command, which is also something the study very specifically called out as "having a marginal negative effect"
And from personal experience, I can only confirm that many people seem to see this as the main purpose of agents/claude md files - a persistent architectural overview of your project.
Quick Edit: My point simply being that I think it's understandable if some people don't understand the big deal about these files because they've had a drastically different experience than other people - anthropic themselves recommend apparently totally ineffective practices on their website, and the starter tool present in many harnesses seems to even have a (marginal) negative effect.
this right here, call out your project best practices and peculiarities in AGENTS.md
I suspect eventually this will move to fine-tuning, there are multi-tenant LoRAs on the horizon that will let us keep paying per-token on FTs
Why not symlink AGENTS.md to CLAUD.md?
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
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)
Works fine for me too. I use this for GEMINI.md as well.
ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md
You're welcome!
My Claude.md has one line that says to read agents.md, this is a bit of a nothingburger
You can save a tool call by just making it a symlink
You can also use @AGENTS.md which automatically concatenates the files
This is the way.
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.
Are you saying this wouldn’t happen if the file had a different name? Or just that codex is better at instruction following.
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
At the current price for SSDs even a pointless symlink becomes waste...
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.
Are you serious? A symlink is probably one of the smallest files you can possibly generate.
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
cp AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md
what am I missing?
maintenance, being a good player in the ai ecosystem
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.
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
Ant is also buying politicians and attempting regulatory capture, not things I'm keen to have corporations doing
Anthropic implemented it https://github.com/Piebald-AI/tweakcc/pull/459
Where does your link say it’s Anthropic?
Not really Anthropic.
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...