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Discussion (182 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The mod is source available here: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/mods/age...
Apologies again folks, this was a fully human error on my part - I should've found a better way to launch with a kill-switch.
If folks play around with it, I would love feedback on the relevant issue: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/91870
Mods allow quite a bit more customizability and control. I really believe in the idea.
https://github.com/user-attachments/files/31802150/EXTERNAL....
Might I gently suggest that you have a model at least as capable as Opus 5.5 translate that from Claudish to English? Or, even better, have an actual human work on the docs a bit? As it stands, they are fairly egregious, and they seem to devote at least as much space to little AI-generated quips that convey no meaning than to actually explaining what’s going on.
Also, maybe a human should decide whether these are “function” hooks or “module” hooks. All of this marketing calls them “function” hooks, but the json config seems entirely unaware of this.
(Has anyone else noticed that half the sentences in Claudish aren’t merely weird: they are noun phrases and not sentences at all? I’m pretty sure that any decent pre-LLM NLP-based grammar checker would correctly flag half the sentences in Claudish. Also, whatever variant of Claude wrote this thing can’t even capitalize around semicolons consistently with itself, let alone consistently with how English has been written for at least a century.)
edit: Fixed the link. Thanks, kaszanka.
Rest assured I'll inject a bit less soul into the official docs once Mods are launched; re your feedback on the JSON key, what would you recommend?
Probably just a case of a company hoping their scale can change the societal standard faster than they can be bothered to match the standard.
You'll talk like 2023 unsupervised TikTok generators and you'll be happy.
As for the only difference being the file name, that's an untested assumption. Up until now, Claude hadn't supported AGENTS.md, and it's a simple application of Hyrum's Law that somebody, somewhere, was taking advantage of that to give one set of instructions to Claude, and a different set of instructions to some other provider. The correct behaviour in the presence of both files is not obvious, either.
Having a kill switch for the change is a perfectly reasonable safety measure in case something goes horribly wrong.
There are processes to make changes outside of feature flags, but they have enough friction that it's easier to just use a feature flag.
This level of paranoia is consistent with the blast radius of changes breaking Claude users.
Vibe-coding gotta vibe-code.
I don't think this is a reasonable assumption. The document format in CLAUDE.md is whatever Anthropic specifies, where AGENTS.md is a common ground format that is expected to be supported by any agent, be it from Anthropic or not.
https://agents.md/
You might argue that differences are small or negligible, but that is just an expectation.
The deciding factor for me whether or not I will work on the feature of the plugin is whether I (or rather, my agent) can look in upstream source and evaluate if it can be done with minimal upstream change, which I then contribute. And generally, even if no upstream change is needed, agents work so much better when they can read the code.
So why not just make Claude code open source? Considering also that source code was leaked once anyway.
An extensibility system called mods, which is a plugin with a new type of hook that we call function hook?
I can't tell if this is real, or you are making fun of overengineered AI solutions.
Is this real?
It's much preferable to be able to instantly fix it if the rollout of a new feature goes wrong than have everyone who installed the broken version bring stuck with problems until the company realizes the issue and rolls forwards with a fixed version.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
Blink twice if you need help
I've had to send such messages, but internally at work, not on HN!
Have a great day, human.
I know I know, why are we giving money to trump? Its because he's going to take it anyways so can't we at least apply some window dressing?
fuckin laughable, literally invoked a laugh from me in real life.
I hope customers aren't so stupid that they think a chatty developer on twitter/hn/mastodon/screaming-in-the-wind/wherever (or any other public-facing-place) means shit about customer service, and that goes towards ANY company where the primary customer service is an LLM.
Anthropic is the only company where it took (!) 9 weeks (!) to convince to hand over a 4 dollar refund for book-keeping errors on their side that caused an inappropriately early account deactivation due to time zone issues on their end, while all the while telling me that they don't offer refunds. It took stacks of evidence and argument, and that was after spending two weeks in their system trying to convince every level that I was worth a human.
For me personally it'd require Dario to resort to armed mugging to see another buck out of my wallet. I'm not alone.
tl;dr : being able to convince the powers that be on highly active industry forums (hacker news, twitter, mastodon..?) to act right using the power of peer shaming doesn't good customer service make. That said -- I do appreciate the direct response/statement from mpoteat;
..I just don't appreciate the good actions of a decent individual being too broadly interpreted as the do-good customer-centric nature of Anthropic .. an element I do not believe exists there.
At least make an argument for switching vendors based on the quality or price of their service.
After the last month or so in the Codex app, I was pleased with the Claude app.
It might be a case of the grass always being greener on the other side, but this is what stands out:
After 3-4 hours of usage, the weekly usage limit moved by only 1%.
Compared to Astra where I can watch the limit draining live, this is a great improvement.
I'd estimate it 3x cheaper, and that's with a 450k context limit instead of the 258k in Codex.
So far Opus 5.5 appears less prone to stopping for no apparent reason at checkpoints in the middle of a longer task.
It doesn't open an internal browser with a useless comparison page, where it then proceeds to add notes despite no one having asked for it.
It is a breath of fresh air: I get the response in the chat, while the Codex app recently loves randomly opening artifacts instead.
Opus 5.5 xhigh made great progress on the task, more so than Astra High, but that could be random chance.
Oh, and the 'Auto' mode actually works and does not force me to instead run 'Full access' like in the Codex app, lest it blocks even 'git push'.
> claude update Current version: 2.1.280 Checking for updates to latest version... Claude Code is up to date (2.1.280)
Would be interesting to know how much time you/your team spent on that design decision
as i said in another comment. i don't want someone to toy with my software remotely. that seems wrong to me!
i do not like others to decide that they know what is best for me. and then force it on me without my consent.
i will decide if i like your changes. if i do like your fix, i will install it.
in my car, do not remotely turn off my air conditioning. don't turn off my AGENTS.md.
IMHO it's worth keeping in mind that Anthropic employees are some of the least likely to casually pass off artificial prose as authentic, given the company's ethos/brand/cover story (depending on how cynical you are). To them this is all getting pretty high stakes pretty damn quickly; based on my usage of full strength Opus 5.5 today, I can't even imagine what working with their full internal stack must feel like. If they were willing to let the machines speak for them, they'd all be melancholically lounging around home by now instead of coming in to work!
...I am refusing to consider the fact that they probably are still WFH because of Salesforce forcing their shared security contractor to strike. Call that a mental health ignorance on my part :)
for an organization that is being used as a model for new agentic software development practices.... and every software exec on earth is trying to reshape their organizations after - its a pretty stupid bug for a feature that should've been straightforward in the first place + took forever for them to get around to.
its just kind of emblamatic of the rough edges that exist EVEN FOR SIMPLE THINGS whenever human judgement is totally removed the equation.
Oops, easy mistake!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815363
Nothing to do with AI patches at all, nor was it a bug. It was intentional human behavior, a temporary rollout setting, that seems to have made sense.
But I guess that doesn't fit the "narrative".
"LLMize the succeses, humanize the failures." is the PR strategy at play here. Anything goes well it's because AI did it, anything goes bad it's because a human didn't catch it.
No matter what happens to be the truth, HNers have a cynical narrative to fit it.
Not sure if they later move the code from inside the flag check to the main code or that they keep the flag check.
But if they would keep all features behind a flag that would not make most sense as you then would have not many features without telemetry.
> Added AGENTS.md support: in a project with no CLAUDE.md, Claude Code reads AGENTS.md instead
My dumb brain tells me none of this is rolled out progressively (as of that version). You either have it or not.
Anthropic commonly gates behind feature flags that require telemetry until they're "promoted" and defaulted on.
A little bit annoying you can't manually control the flags without telemetry but I think the title is a bit click bait.
To always read both, you have to switch the 'Project instructions' setting to the non-default `claude-md-and-agents-md`.
Just in case anyone is wondering why their AGENTS.md still isn't being read.
If people only glance over the code agents generate for them and don't bother to spend even half a minute thinking through what's actually happening, this is inevitable.
Certainly this kind of things happened before LLMs existed. But I'm not optimistic about the direction of how things are going.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
It’s a simple distributed systems problem. Separate the deployment of a new software feature (to umpteen hosts) from the triggering of that software with a lightweight switch.
If someone think that reading AGENTS.md is always benign, because they can’t imagine how it could be a problem…users are very creative.
Not sure what y’all are thinking with these unwritten conspiracy theories that begin and end with “it’s intentional”
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/
+ not letting users change their email, or remove their payment methods, etc.
which works except that claude uses .skills/synced which is uses to sync changes to skills from claude servers into the skills folder.
every other agent I have used just directly syncs into .skills so it ends up duplicating skills
The same people who've spent years of their career making sure that never happens.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760449
So I am unsure if it is fitting to call it a "closed source" harness.
[0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code
Edit: The linked repository does not contain source code for Claude Code, the harness, itself. It only contains the source code for (some) scripts, mods and plugins.
"This repository includes several Claude Code plugins that extend functionality with custom commands and agents. See the plugins directory for detailed documentation on available plugins."
But I'm not a TypeScript guy, so I concede I might be missing something incredibly obvious. I remember there was a leak of the Claude Code source code at one point, and people vibe coding conversions to other languages from the leak, but I don't think the Claude Code harness itself is open source or even source available.
I just read the first line in the README file which says:
> Claude Code is an agentic coding tool ...
and I immediately assumed that this is what this repository hosts.
It claims that it includes plugins but that does not mean it does not include anything else. It also never explicitly claims, as far as I can tell, that it does not hold the source code of Claude Code, the harness, itself.
It is all extremely misleading, in my opinion. Which might be on purpose, unfortunately.
Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760187
@agents.md
AGI was reached like 2 weeks ago, latest claude 5.x models rule supreme and software engineering is solved?
claude-md-or-agents-md
claude-md-and-agents-md
So, these tools have a file they want to read in with some configuration.
That filename is hardcoded?
Fucking DOOM had a command line parameter to provide an arbitrary configuration file name!
That's completely irrespective of the fact that you need a feature flag set by remote infrastructure to change a setting of which completely local file to read.
It's weird, I feel like Claude would have tried to make this a configurable setting by default! Is that just not an option in JS land? Not a common pattern to have configuration in the first place? I don't know about that, all the JS based code editors have comprehensive configuration files.
What the hell is going on....
The response as it is now sounds fair. Before that it was not.