Hacker News

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.

just the filename. The contents of the file are unstructured, besides being markdown

Why do people continue to use the word “moat” only in context of AI companies?

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.

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.)

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.

Actually, Reddit is a lot more dead than that right now. I would argue >90% of the content now is fake.

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.

They’re all hostile.

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.

Fireworks and OpenCode both have excellent open model offerings

prefer open companies to closed ones

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.

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.

Is there a way to make this with for both window and Linux users through git?

> 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.

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.

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.

Except I actively despise that commit message anytime I see it.

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.

> They wont do it.

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

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.

Apple at least builds things with a modicum of quality control, which is not the case for Anthropic.

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" }

I don’t see that the issue was closed by that PR. Where do you see that?

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

Anthropic are the only ones who think they can ignore the open standards. Absolute dirt bags.

kinda feels like agents.md is just a README with stricter consequences for being wrong

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.

people use it because it does in fact make a sizable difference in experience and outcomes

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.

You can save a tool call by just making it a symlink

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.

At the current price for SSDs even a pointless symlink becomes waste...

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

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).

maintenance, being a good player in the ai ecosystem

Where does your link say it’s Anthropic?

Not really Anthropic.