They don't even allow alternative harnesses on their subscription model. (But they do allow a agent-sdk that can pretend to be a generic compatible endpoint the alternative harnesses can use).
If you like your stuff overengineered, gated, and over-priced then by all means.
Its not even wrong from Anthropic because it's the path to most profit.
I'll take the opinion of people who have strong opinions about mild inconveniences.
Between my goals and Anthropic's bottom line, i want my goal to win out without needless inconveniences.
If you think I'm wrong, and these arguments have nothing to do with it, just tell us what explains Claude not supporting AGENTS.md.
Was it such a grand engineering challenge? Too many 'legacy' projects relying on both AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md and that has recently changed?
I've made clear my belief on the reason behind it - branding decisions outweighing utility.
Add something to the thread by sharing your version of a 'more likely' decision process that led to the choice to only now support it.
> Our reasoning for this was that we don't think that model families are interchangeable and the system prompt can have a big impact on performance.
I don’t disagree with anything you say, I just don’t think AGENTS.md ever was a big deal, just a small annoyance
Sometimes, Anthropic has pushed standards (MCP, Skills), and that is great, but other times they have explicitly built incompatibilities. With the Plug-in marketplaces, it is quite similar.
When prompted to write to it, it will always try to write into the Claude.md and error out with that approach.. It eventually figures it out, but it's a ymmv situation I think
How is agents.md and different? Just a standard for other models? Is claude the lower standard now?
Sent from my iPhone.
I was quite annoyed with Claude earlier this year when I had to maintain duplicate files or rely on symlinks.
Seemed like a waste of time simply because Anthropic didn’t want to take the “L” and accept that AGENTS.md was the new standard.
IMO, this kind of product decision making is why so many products either suck, or they’re are good but not great … and users have zero loyalty.
I find it super annoying this building lock in instead of loyalty approach to product seems to be standard practice these days.
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