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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 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).

My Claude.md has one line that says to read agents.md, this is a bit of a nothingburger
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.
how does agents.md work for subagents and swarms? is it actually that useful?
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

A good one does, yeah.

A bad one is noticeably harmful.

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.
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.

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.

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.
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

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.

They did walk that back, you are able to use an Anthropic login in a non-anthropic harness. (For now.)
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.

    > Is there any provider that doesn’t do this? That’s the one I want to support.
Yes, IIRC, OpenAI. In sama we trust??
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

> 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.

Yeah, exactly, the thinking process of the latest Claude models have really mucked up the responses they show to users, presumably to game benchmarks or something. My agents are constantly referring to things that happened behind the scenes, either in thinking or with subagents, as if I had full visibility into every aspect of everything they saw. But with Claude Code, everything is hidden.

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.

T3 Code if you want to use your subscriptions in an interface that respects its users.
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.
I resist the Node.js rage by using the Rust agent https://maki.sh/ . It is very capable and has a sane plugin system via Lua.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work with CC's other features like the lazy loading of CLAUDE.md files in subdirectories.
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 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.

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.
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!

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

So because of the hardship of renaming a file, creating a symlink, or importing another file, you rename a file.

If somebody switches because of this, then they lie.

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.

I think this is the same myopia that all successful companies get. They begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product, their users and how it's used.

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...

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, 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.

It sounds to me like you're describing enshittification.

> 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.)

it's always been this way with Claude/Ant though, not something that changed

This is more SV modus operandi

Precisely. Anthropic was never good to its consumer users.

    (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.

> 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?

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.

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!

The gaggle of UK powermods is a turnoff in my opinion, their egos and profound mismangement of their subreddits are a big part of why I have nothing to do with reddit any more.

In my view nobody should be modding more than one subreddit, and they should be paid not volunteers. The moderation here is infinitely more sensible than on reddit in my view.

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.

This is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy
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.

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-part 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.
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
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

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
(comment deleted)
Or better cp -a AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md (or ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md if some of your tooling doesn't play well with hardlinks but does with symlinks) then if one changes so does the other as they are the same file with two links.

Not sure how source control will deal with this though, even if it commits to git/other fine Windows users might have trouble (NTFS supports both hardlinks and symlinks, since Vista IIRC, but mklink requires elevated privileges).

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.

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)
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.)

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.
Stop supporting Anthropic with your money. They are a hostile company.
Fireworks and OpenCode both have excellent open model offerings

prefer open companies to closed ones

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.
They’re all hostile.
I’m just glad that “hostile” is the pejorative of the week, was getting really tired of “rent-seeking”.
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...

> 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.

agentsmd is a ridiculous concept, it feels like a huge psyop that theres so much hullabaloo about this ridiculous markdown file.
@boris and anthropic in general are incredibly hostile to the rest of the development world. They think their shit doesn’t stink.
I think it mostly amounts to getting extremely high on their own supply.

Many of us have experienced the sinking feeling of having used an agent to build an entire beautiful castle and then turned around and found themselves lost in its dungeons unaware of how the thing is actually laid out.

I actually think they're fully down there in their own code base, product requirements, and the like and ... don't know what's around the bend anymore.

And when you have leadership at the top insisting that software engineers will be obsolete any day now, what do you expect? Good solid software engineering requires competent stable and principled leadership hopefully with an obsession on quality and customer excellence.

Telling people that their profession is obsolete because robots are taking it over is only going to poison the well.

Core engineering at Anthropic seems to have just rotted away.

[delayed]
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.
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.