Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

58% Positive

Analyzed from 1805 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#claude#agents#code#anthropic#file#read#support#more#files#symlink

Discussion (76 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

areoform•about 3 hours ago
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.

chipsa•26 minutes ago
> 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.

Wowfunhappy•about 2 hours ago
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.)

OutOfHere•3 minutes ago
Precisely. Anthropic was never good to its consumer users.
verdverm•about 1 hour ago
it's always been this way with Claude/Ant though, not something that changed

This is more SV modus operandi

OleksandrC•about 3 hours ago
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.
postalcoder•about 3 hours ago
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.

epistasis•about 2 hours ago
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.

annzabelle•about 2 hours ago
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.

surgical_fire•36 minutes ago
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.

johnsmith1840•about 1 hour ago
Except I actively despise that commit message anytime I see it.
nullbio•about 2 hours ago
Stop supporting Anthropic with your money. They are a hostile company.
verdverm•about 1 hour ago
Fireworks and OpenCode both have excellent open model offerings

prefer open companies to closed ones

wxw•about 3 hours ago
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.

Wowfunhappy•about 3 hours ago
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.

jpalomaki•about 1 hour ago
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...

skeledrew•about 3 hours ago
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.
Sha1rholder•about 2 hours ago
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.
postalcoder•about 3 hours ago
Unfortunately, this doesn't work with CC's other features like the lazy loading of CLAUDE.md files in subdirectories.
threecheese•about 2 hours ago
I use something like this in every project and it has no issues that I’m aware of - the file has one line: an include (@). Maybe gitignoring it is an issue, given that Claude tries to honor it?
asveikau•about 1 hour ago
> 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.

Jcampuzano2•about 3 hours ago
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!

Planktonne•about 3 hours ago
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.

dude250711•about 3 hours ago
They want to be the Apple of AI: producing non-standard interfaces and making grandiose claims.
Advertisement
jjcm•about 2 hours ago
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

HDBaseT•about 2 hours ago
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.

agentdev001•about 2 hours ago
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.)

wfurney•about 2 hours ago
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.
drivingmenuts•about 1 hour ago
Why not symlink AGENTS.md to CLAUD.md?
sudonem•about 1 hour ago
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)

Demiurge•about 1 hour ago
Works fine for me too. I use this for GEMINI.md as well.
shay_ker•about 3 hours ago
how does agents.md work for subagents and swarms? is it actually that useful?
baby_souffle•about 3 hours ago
A good one does, yeah.

A bad one is noticeably harmful.

verdverm•about 3 hours ago
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

wilg•about 3 hours ago
Also the skills are different. it's quite annoying!
Sammi•about 2 hours ago
Anthropic are the only ones who think they can ignore the open standards. Absolute dirt bags.
luciana1u•about 3 hours ago
every tool ships its own instruction file and somehow the actual standard is still the README everyone half-reads and forgets to update
douglas77•about 2 hours ago
croes•about 2 hours ago
Where does your link say it’s Anthropic?
LetMeLogin•about 2 hours ago
Not really Anthropic.
acedTrex•about 1 hour ago
agentsmd is a ridiculous concept, it feels like a huge psyop that theres so much hullabaloo about this ridiculous markdown file.
verdverm•about 1 hour ago
people use it because it does in fact make a sizable difference in experience and outcomes
verdverm•about 3 hours ago
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 and open source harnesses 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

Jcampuzano2•about 3 hours ago
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).

chomp•about 3 hours ago
My Claude.md has one line that says to read agents.md, this is a bit of a nothingburger
eigenspace•about 3 hours ago
You can save a tool call by just making it a symlink
Mossly•about 2 hours ago
You can also use @AGENTS.md which automatically concatenates the files
hparadiz•about 3 hours ago
This is the way.
superfrank•about 3 hours ago
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.

threecheese•about 2 hours ago
Are you saying this wouldn’t happen if the file had a different name? Or just that codex is better at instruction following.
superfrank•about 2 hours ago
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
sschueller•about 3 hours ago
At the current price for SSDs even a pointless symlink becomes waste...
eigenspace•about 3 hours ago
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.

inventor7777•about 2 hours ago
Are you serious? A symlink is probably one of the smallest files you can possibly generate.
verdverm•about 3 hours ago
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

Advertisement
JohnMakin•about 2 hours ago
cp AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md

what am I missing?

verdverm•about 1 hour ago
maintenance, being a good player in the ai ecosystem