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 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.

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.

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.

If somebody switches because of this, then they lie.

> 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.)

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

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.

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.

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 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.)

prefer open companies to closed ones

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.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory#agents-md

But yeah, I think the ultimate goal of Anthropic is just to have a CLAUDE.md in every repository for marketing.

$ 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" }

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.

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.

That's the point of this post, Boris Cherny closed it as "completed", of course without implementing it.