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  • Hacker News
  • 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.
    by skeledrew
  • Unfortunately, this doesn't work with CC's other features like the lazy loading of CLAUDE.md files in subdirectories.
    by postalcoder
  • 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.
    by Sha1rholder
  • I didn’t even realize Claude Code doesn’t honor AGENTS.md. Nothing a quick sed -i -e s/CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/g can’t fix
    by fmajid
  • I was thinking ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md but to each their own.
    by Frost1x
  • 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.
    by OleksandrC
  • Except I actively despise that commit message anytime I see it.
    by johnsmith1840
  • 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.

    by postalcoder
  • 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

    by jjcm
  • @boris and anthropic in general are incredibly hostile to the rest of the development world. They think their shit doesn’t stink.
    by johnmlussier
  • 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.

    by cmrdporcupine
  • Workaround: local symlink from CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md, inside each repo.

    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.

    by blevinstein
  • Is there a way to make this with for both window and Linux users through git?
    by phito
  • 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.

    by stingraycharles
  • > 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.

    by asveikau
  • 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.

    by wxw
  • 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.

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

    prefer open companies to closed ones

    by verdverm
  • They’re all hostile.
    by voisin
  • 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.
    by fallingbananna
  • 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.

    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.

    by areoform
  • 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.

    by OkGoDoIt
  • This is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy
    by inigyou
  • Actually, Reddit is a lot more dead than that right now. I would argue >90% of the content now is fake.
    by kaliqt
  • 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.

    by monksy
  • 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.)

    by Wowfunhappy
  • > 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.

    by chipsa
  • 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.
    by thm
  • You can inject custom Javascript into Claude Code via BUN_OPTIONS="--preload=/path/to/code.js". For example: https://gist.github.com/Wowfunhappy/002009cf9c410ed2f751bde8...

    I wonder if you could use this to make the harness recognize AGENTS.md.

    by Wowfunhappy