Feature Request: Support AGENTS.md
github.com
github.com
Just a few days ago they turned on an experiment the forces claude code to use bash over standard tools in auto mode.
From the system prompt directly, new as of August 18th:
Do your work through the Bash tool wherever it can accomplish the job: read files with cat, head, or sed -n, search with grep and find, and make file changes with sed, heredocs, or short scripts, rather than using the dedicated Read, Edit, or Write tools. Fall back to a dedicated tool only when Bash genuinely cannot do the job.
I'm sure they'll argue they are trying to make it use less context tokens to do things, but if this is the best they could think of, ....
This is of course, also not documented anywhere, as is typical for anthropic, you just have to guess whether you are going crazy or if they changed stuff seriously on you under the covers.
This was the last straw for me. Their harness (models are fine) was already falling well behind the other one i use (OMP) in the past 6 months in usability/etc, and they are the only ones who don't allow me to use other harnesses with my subscription.
So I've now stopped using claude code entirely. Unless something changes, i'll drop my max plan when it expires next month.
It is extraordinary how they managed to fuck up all of their goodwill with all these unnecessary stuff. They truly are a hostile company if I have ever seen one. And they had the entire developer community cheering for them a couple months ago.
I hope they fail in their mission, whatever that is. Because I'm sure it's no benefit to anyone ever.
Oh, I used Claude before they got popular… their new stuff is trash compared to the early albums
I personally got sick as f with their unreliability and hostility and bugs back in about January and switched to Codex but this is still very clearly a minority position.
I'm sure OpenAI will do the same nonsense eventually, but people need to act like they have options.
The product is almost completely vibed with no humans in the loop (neither writing nor reading).
IOW, there is little to no human judgement or care exercised in the production and maintenance of it, with predictable results.
OpenAI feels like a bastion of competent management and development compared to this shit show and they have a psychopath on the helm. This is an achievement by itself.
Google too.
So the agent is going to put less into context when it uses sed to see 15 lines of a file than using read and putting the entire file into context.
That is my best charitable guess at what they are hoping to achieve.
Of course, there is an obvious set of solutions for this problem that don't involve pushing the agent to use bash.
Part of the reason i assume is that to extract 5 line ranges is a single line very small sed call that it has to output, but 5 separate full read calls it has to output correctly and quickly.
Who knows.
I wonder if you could use this to make the harness recognize AGENTS.md.
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.
> 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.)
This is more SV modus operandi
(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.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
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?
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.
The company has turned evil sadly.
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.
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'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.
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.
That's fuckin lame.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
New reddit: Doesn't require a login Redlib: Doesn't require a login
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 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.
But >90%? Can you provide something that supports something in this ballpark?
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.
prefer open companies to closed ones
So this instead becomes a nonsense product decision and a reason to switch off Claude Code.
If somebody switches because of this, then they lie.
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.
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.
But yeah, I think the ultimate goal of Anthropic is just to have a CLAUDE.md in every repository for marketing.
Many of us have experienced the sinking feeling of having used an agent to build an entire beautiful castle and then turned around and found themselves lost in its dungeons unaware of how the thing is actually laid out.
I actually think they're fully down there in their own code base, product requirements, and the like and ... don't know what's around the bend anymore.
And when you have leadership at the top insisting that software engineers will be obsolete any day now, what do you expect? Good solid software engineering requires competent stable and principled leadership hopefully with an obsession on quality and customer excellence.
Telling people that their profession is obsolete because robots are taking it over is only going to poison the well.
Core engineering at Anthropic seems to have just rotted away.
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'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.
It's like the PMs for Claude Code are reward hacking their own reinforcement learning.
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.
Most are easy to share with symlinks and @agents.
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).
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!
(Edit: I failed too mention, using a different harness with a CC/Anthropic subscription bumps you up to the pay-per-token rate.)
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.
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.
> Is there any provider that doesn’t do this? That’s the one I want to support.
This is... close. They offer ways to leverage openai subscription directly for 3rd party app use. https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/app-server
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.
I've taken to looking through the jsonl of sessions rather than trying to get Claude Code to explain what it means, and have better success about 50% of the time.
Older models work better, IMHO, and one can configure Claude Code to use any model that supports Anthropic Messages format, or a translator to other models, but the TUI itself is something I'm also straining against, and prefer Pi usually.
Anthropic's moat is actually workplace environments that are serving the opposing goals of 1) executive demands to use AI, and 2) legal demands to keep all company data on lockdown. In that environment, employees can get locked into whatever the approved AI methods are, and Anthropic excels in navigating that.
It has a sort of first mover advantage, but I wouldn't be surprised if basically any harness is superior to that crap.
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.
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.
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
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).
I fully expect I will be switching every couple of years to a new one. And even if I don't, they will be very different then than they are today.
- " 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!
- .cursor/rules
- CLAUDE.md
- .github/copilot-instructions.md
- .aider.conf.yml
- .gemini/settings.json
A simple @AGENTS.md at the top of CLAUDE.md makes it play nice.
Why not iterate on README.md with something like PARSEME.md?
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.
> 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".
Well, it was semantic from the beginning, the whole discussion I raised is because you seem unable to understand what "structured data" actually means in reality. I know perfectly fine what you meant, and you were misinformed about the meaning, it's OK to just say "Yeah, you're right" or just don't reply at all instead of double-down on not understand the meaning of words. Anyways, enjoy your day.
Oh no, my mood is great, life couldn't be better. Don't mistake me wanting people to use words they understand for me being upset, it's just words and text, ultimately it all has little meaning compared to the grandness of life.
Excellent.
echo "Get stuffed, you aren't welcome." > AGENTS.md
cp AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md
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...
I think we’re going to see some aggressive attempts at lock in quite soon. What choice do they have?
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.)
Is that a misconfiguration, or is that on purpose for Github? I never noticed that before.
It also reads "Remaining: #58639 #29385"
$ 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" }
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-...
Anthropic can do everything to make more money, including supporting the department of war, screwing its users if necessary and so on
That's true but this is really not something that's a barrier to switching, just an annoyance for users. All it takes is a rename/symlink/reference whatever from the user's perspective. If it required a lot of rearchitecting on Anthropic's side or it was a _lot_ harder for users to adapt to I'd understand them standing their ground on this issue. But neither of those are true, it's just pettiness.
And its probably also to make people think there’s something special about Claude.
Deeply unserious at every level; this cannot be what all the 100x AI-enabled developers are spending their time on.
yes, they are useful, mainly in that they shorten the context gathering phase and can call out gotchyas, keep it minimal
A bad one is noticeably harmful.
@AGENTS.mdMost 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.
> 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.
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
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.
If it's useful to an LLM its useful to a human, information should be treated as human first, the LLM will come along with it.
That's the point of this post, Boris Cherny closed it as "completed", of course without implementing it.
Wow you mean the things that keeps happening happened again? Eventually we’ll have to learn to recognize and stomp out the snakes.
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)
Both techniques have worked (and been officially documented by Anthropic) for as long as I can remember.
You're welcome!
I see this obstinance as an intent signal and one of the smaller bullet points I have for avoiding Ant
My experience is that what you're suggesting isn't a perfect solution.
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.
what am I missing?
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
Not sure how source control will deal with this though, even if it commits to git/other fine Windows users might have trouble (NTFS supports both hardlinks and symlinks, since Vista IIRC, but mklink requires elevated privileges).
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...