Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]

Crazy part is: can’t tell if this intended or a bug

• vaylian · 20 hours ago

  Can you think of a bug that makes sense in this case?

  • hgoel · 20 hours ago

    Vibe coding

    • thejazzman · 20 hours ago

      It is most certainly the kind of subtle bug the LLMs love to slip in and burn you in production Not sure what y’all are thinking with these unwritten conspiracy theories that begin and end with “it’s intentional”

  • jpitz · 20 hours ago

    Assuming that it's intentional, what's the motivation?

    • kriro · 20 hours ago

      Get more people to turn on telemetry.

    • zigzag312 · 19 minutes ago

      Publish new features first to clients that provide feedback, so rollout can be stopped, if there's an issue with new version. Telemetry off effectively prioritizes stability over speed of recieving new versions.

• kennethops · 20 hours ago

  I like to give my graces to people and the companies who are typically not trillions of dollars. Have an incredible amount of resources that many countries would like to have, with fewer of the obligations. I'm going to chalk this up to its intended

• serial_dev · 20 hours ago

  Someone on the Claude Code team is probably wondering the same...

• Razengan · 20 hours ago

  Claude/Anthropic has been sus from the start: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/ + not letting users change their email, or remove their payment methods, etc.

  • jaapz · 20 hours ago

    many of these can also be chalked up to the fact that all of their products are extremely vibed

  • nibbleyou · 20 hours ago

    I cannot set a password for login, on logging in it says we've sent a login code but it's a link instead...

Vibe-coding at its best.

Nice find, though I'd rather read the prompt that was used to write this article. It is about ten times longer than it needs to and is quite painful to read.

Based on my experience with these tools so far, this seems exactly the kind of subtle but extremely severe bug that sneaks in when you start piling up layers of AI generated patches to a codebase without caring too much about the code.

• hgoel · 20 hours ago

  Yep, especially with long contexts (and moreso if the last thing you were working on in the same context involved telemetry too). AI sneaks in weird conditions like this and then does the entire "You're absolutely right" thing if you're paying enough attention to catch it.

• crazygringo · 20 hours ago

  It seems to be exactly the opposite, a "fully human error": 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".

  • q3k · 19 hours ago

    > It seems to be exactly the opposite, a "fully human error" "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.

    • crazygringo · 19 hours ago

      Wow people are cynical here. No matter what happens to be the truth, HNers have a cynical narrative to fit it.

      • abathologist · 19 hours ago

        People are just paying attention to what is happening the world.

        • crazygringo · 18 hours ago

          No, people seem to be adopting simplistic narratives and then slotting the facts wherever they most conveniently fit into their narrative.

      • shimman · 17 hours ago

        You say cynical but employees at these companies also lie just as much as their leaders. It's good to be skeptical of people that want to capture generational wealth while destroying the planet. People aren't cynical enough here.

  • fg137 · 19 hours ago

    One thing I do know is that an Anthropic employee is definitely NOT going to blame this on the model they are using.

  • pasteleft · 13 hours ago

    I don't understand what you are talking about. Vibecoding IS a human error.

• tpurves · 20 hours ago

  Except that, and this I find slightly amusing, is a situation where they definitely don't want to publicly blame the ai model when there are mistakes.

• Agentlien · 20 hours ago

  I used to actively use Msty for local models because it just worked and had a lot of nice advanced features. A few months ago they released their beta version of a Claw-like UI and mentioned using a version of it to develop Msty itself. Well, that was around the time I stopped using Msty because every update started breaking things and two updates in a row included bugs which wiped all my configs, chats, and history.

• HotHotLava · 19 hours ago

  "extremely severe" - aren't we laying it on a bit thick here? The whole impact seems to be that users who have telemetry turned off got this feature ~2 days later, when the bug was noticed.

  • code_runner · 19 hours ago

    a "feature" that every user has asked for - which is the equivalent of changing claude.md to agents.md - and the release isn't even smooth because the telemetry isn't wired up quite right. 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.

    • code_runner · 19 hours ago

      ps: apparently thats not how you spell emblematic - but I'm actually glad to leave a little humanity around given the topic :D

    • t-writescode · 17 hours ago

      Or it’s as simple as “hey, they don’t want telemetry? Cool, we’ll turn off all the extra phoning home” and their feature flag code uses the same paths as telemetry because it’s the same endpoint, etc. Oops, easy mistake!

      • quintu5 · 15 hours ago

        Except it’s not a new issue. This is just the feature that made it a conversation topic.

    • archonis · 17 hours ago

      Good thing they don't apply the same standards to security sandboxes.

  • ares623 · 7 hours ago

    and the enshittification lives on

  • csomar · 2 hours ago

    The issue is that this is the thing that got “noticed”. The problem is that your program behavior is now unpredictable. Anything can happen!

Issue 95690, opened 3 days ago, 500k+ engineers, a simple CLI... AGI was reached like 2 weeks ago, latest claude 5.x models rule supreme and software engineering is solved?

• geophph · 19 hours ago

  Turns out AGI boils down to two markdown files: claude-md-or-agents-md claude-md-and-agents-md

Isn't that how they just release all features? So they can do progressive roll outs and telemetry on issues with 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.

• fg137 · 20 hours ago

  This is what's written in their release notes for 2.1.277: > 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.

• nijave · 19 hours ago

  It's been like this at least months. I turned telemetry off a few months ago and it basically prevented all stages rollouts of new features from working. 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.

I use cursor and claude, its kinda annoying having to have the same skills in both so I made a ~/.agents/skills folder then ln both cursor and claude skills to point to that folder. 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

can i ask claude to change these settings for me, and will it enable telemetry as implied checkpoint when i ask it to enable AGENTS.md?

I am once again (for the third time) [0] asking you to stop using a closed-source harness. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760449

• pbasista · 19 hours ago

  I understand the motivation for such a concern. But Claude Code in particular has its source code available on GitHub [0]. 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.

  • wccrawford · 19 hours ago

    It's not open source. It's more "source available", since it's published, but you legally can't do anything with it. Other than maybe build it yourself, for yourself, I guess.

  • SyneRyder · 19 hours ago

    Forgive me if I'm missing something really obvious, we'll blame it on lack of sleep... but is that actually the full source to Claude Code? I'm looking at the repository and I only see source for plugins, mods and scripts. When I get to the readme, it says: "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.

    • pbasista · 18 hours ago

      I think you are not missing anything. I have not checked the code itself originally, I am sorry for that. But you are right that there seem to be no actual code for the harness itself. Just the code for (some) mods, plugins and scripts. 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.

  • sunaookami · 19 hours ago

    That's not the source code. Claude Code is proprietary.

Uhm I turned off everything there is to turn off in my Pro plan, and Claude just read my agents.md with no issue? So... What telemetry am I missing? Or did they JUST update? (I updated my docker image 40 minutes ago to get Opus 5.5, am on version 2.1.280, so not the mentioned 2.1.277, so it's fixed?)

Sorry folks, this is a rollout artifact, we needed a way to turn this off remotely via feature flags if it broke something, and with telemetry off you don't get those. It's already been fixed as part of v2.1.281 releasing today. 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.

• piltdownman · 20 hours ago

  Much respect for the prompt response, humility, and frank disclosure.

• ndbe · 20 hours ago

  I don't understand, isn't coding solved already?

• mpoteat · 20 hours ago

  The AGENTS.md support was implemented via our new extensibility system for CC, called Mods, which is launching soon-ish. A mod is a plugin with a new type of hook, which we call a function hook. 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.

  • rickette · 20 hours ago

    The only difference between CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md is the filename. Do you really need a whole plugin system to support that use case? Feels like this could have been a one line change.

    • oblio · 20 hours ago

      One line change? Pffft. That means you're still looking at the code, you're behind the times.

    • locknitpicker · 20 hours ago

      > The only difference between CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md is the filename. Do you really need a whole plugin system to support that use case? Feels like this could have been a one line change. 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.

      • BowBun · 19 hours ago

        I think you're giving these files too much credit. There are no specs, they are freeform text. In this sense they are the same. The expectation of what could be in it by each vendor means nothing unless it's enforced.

      • ljm · 19 hours ago

        It's not a format though is it? it's literally just an extension to the system prompt in plain markdown. There is no rhyme or reason to the structure of this file, just like with most things in AI. It's best effort human language.

      • logifail · 19 hours ago

        > The document format in CLAUDE.md is whatever Anthropic specifies Q: Do Anthropic actually specify a document format?

        • taormina · 19 hours ago

          No, they do not.

        • Diti · 18 hours ago

          Nope! Claude is even able to understand AsciiDoc just fine (which is a blessing). But it will always insist on the Markdown extension.

      • sunaookami · 19 hours ago

        There is no "specification", it's literally just a text file that gets loaded into context. You don't even need to write markdown. It's not that hard man.

    • stingraycharles · 19 hours ago

      Yes, but at the same time, it’s also a good, simple use case to test a new plugin system. I can totally understand that.

    • xandrius · 19 hours ago

      Don't you run bizantine ralph loops on remote environments with codex security checks, coupled with jev, grok, open router and a fully independent openclaw (on a maxed out mac mini inside a caveau in an undisclosed location, with open telegram) to change constants? You're going to be left behind.

      • doublerabbit · 19 hours ago

        You sound like my type. hey, wanna come over to myspace so I could twitter your yahoo till you google all over my facebook?

        • Anonyneko · 19 hours ago

          https://youtu.be/-AwCEM5K-Ec

      • newsoftheday · 18 hours ago

        Not related but I think I finally know how it must have felt to the generation prior to mine, when we tried to explain computers to them; because even as a retired 30 year plus software engineer, I have no idea what the comment says.

        • ffsm8 · 18 hours ago

          Unc you're so cooked it's not even funny younger than me but you're out here aura farming in the negatives fr fr. NPC-ahh behavior, 0 aura, -1000 rizz. Couldn't be me Sorry couldn't resist ( ･ั ﹏ ･ั ) Not sure what you didn't understood in their comment though, maybe the raph loop (and jev which was just released)? Isn't the rest completely self explanatory?

        • NicoJuicy · 17 hours ago

          It's almost all related to LLM's, which is fairly new. Basically he's describing an LLM assistant setup that does coding on a vps or Mac mini ( some contradiction with Openrouter though) where you can communicate with the assistant through telegram

          • newsoftheday · 15 hours ago

            OK I do use AI in the browser but haven't tried anything like what you describe. I Googled telegram in case it wasn't what I was thinking, which was used in the 1800's but found their website. It's apparently another messaging platform. Thanks for the interesting view.

            • crooked-v · 14 hours ago

              The tl;dr of the tl;dr is treating the model setup like an autonomous robot with its own machine to use and just telling it what to do via chat rather than directly supervising it, which is bonkers in some ways (all the open internet/service access/permissions stuff you would imagine), and smart in others (a fully isolated machine means it can fuck up something locally or run high-load tests without taking down your important systems).

          • imtringued · 53 minutes ago

            >some contradiction with Openrouter though No the joke is that you need to protect the review server from a runaway humanoid robot pulling the plug on the review server. Or the opposite, the runaway humanoid robot is controlled by an openclaw server that can't be located and shut down.

        • Silagi · 14 hours ago

          I felt a little panic when I understood every word of what was meant to be adjacent to scifi-style garbled engineering speak, and I think I'd rather be on your side of the spectrum.

          • imtringued · 54 minutes ago

            I hate that I understood the post.

    • pdpi · 19 hours ago

      The plugin system itself was probably already in the making, and they just chose to implement this tiny feature as a plugin to try it out. 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.

      • redox99 · 19 hours ago

        That line of thought is the reason why everything gets so overengineered. Read CLAUDE.md if it doesn't exist read AGENTS.md you don't need to overthink it so much.

        • arcfour · 19 hours ago

          This line of thinking is something you will quickly be disabused of once you try supporting software that hundreds of millions of people use. And I say this as someone that loves the Unix philosophy dearly.

          • lunar_mycroft · 19 hours ago

            How, exactly, would the proposed solution (combined with a setting to disable it) break, and how would implementing it the way Anthropic did address that? Be specific.

            • arcfour · 19 hours ago

              Some people might have a different CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md because they use Claude to do one thing and $other_agent to do another thing. Or because Claude does XYZ by default, and other agents do ABC, and they want to give the correct guidance to both. This is, to me, a completely reasonable and believable use case that could break if you implement this fix without "overengineering" it. A setting to disable what? Be specific. See? Not so simple...

              • bakugo · 18 hours ago

                > Read CLAUDE.md if it doesn't exist read AGENTS.md > Some people might have a different CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md How exactly do these two conflict? If you have both, nothing changes.

                • arcfour · 18 hours ago

                  Which order do you prefer them in? Since CLAUDE.md is no longer necessary, but was for so long, what happens when users only update AGENTS.md going forward while keeping a stale, unchanged CLAUDE.md around? We're talking about changing default behaviors here in ways that can be surprising to users. It's reasonable to try and accommodate existing setups, future setups, and - yes - careless users.

                  • scottyah · 17 hours ago

                    At some point, the catering is not worth the sacrifices and future gotchas you're going to embed in the code.

                  • bakugo · 16 hours ago

                    There's no surprising behaviors in that situation. Someone who is aware of the change would most likely delete CLAUDE.md. Someone who is unaware of the change would assume CLAUDE.md is still the one being read by CC, which would hold true.

              • dylan604 · 18 hours ago

                if [ !-f CLAUDE.md ]; then AGENTS.md fi you're really over thinking this, and i'm wondering if you're risking pulling something stretching like that to pick this up shilling for Anthropic.

                • arcfour · 18 hours ago

                  Is accusing someone of "shilling for Anthropic" for suggesting that a bug fix might not be so simple really the level of discourse HN has devolved to now? Is it the kind of HN you want?

                  • dylan604 · 17 hours ago

                    Is the level of HN discourse suggesting that having a large number of users worth of never making simple changes something you want? This isn't a move fast break things suggestion, this is a rational common sense suggestion. Instead, you're pushing an overly complex way of implementing something that would allow for all sorts of unknowns. Earlier comments suggesting this new mods concept was being worked on giving the dev a new 20lb sledge hammer so the CLAUDE/AGENTS situation suddenly got beat on like it was a railroad spike when it just needed a smaller hammer since it was only a finishing nail.

                    • cgriswald · 16 hours ago

                      This conversation comes down to people saying “Why don’t you just…” to Anthropic. Anthropic has the most information and made the choice they made. That choice may have been over-engineering, an appropriate choice or both. Discussing that choice could be interesting and it could especially be informative to people without much experience. Speculating on that could lead to an interesting conversation—especially WRT how people are actually using the current status quo—but imagination seems to be lacking here. Instead we get the implicated assertion that users’ existing workflows shouldn’t matter to Anthropic and accusations that someone you don’t agree with is a shill. When called on that you avoided the question. To answer your question, although it wasn’t directed at me: YES. I want people to be able to discuss that exact issue even if it isn’t personally interesting to me.

                      • troupo · 14 hours ago

                        > Anthropic has the most information and made the choice they made. Anthropic is the last company I would trust to make any decisions. Look at any discussions surrounding their "Claude is a tiny game engine" idiocy, numerous bugs that a junior can discover, a full "plugin system" in which they neeeed a dozen files in the worst Clean Code manner to read one of two files etc.

              • lunar_mycroft · 18 hours ago

                First, GP's proposal already addresses that. If both are present, CLAUDE.md would be used. Second, that is solved with a settings toggle. Read a boolean from .claude/settings.json and disable the new behavior if it's true (or false, depending on what you want to name the setting). third, you skipped the second part of my question: "how would implementing it the way Anthropic did address that?" Implementing the same behavior through multiple layers of abstraction and an order of magnitude more code doesn't solve the issue you mentioned. Bonus forth point: why is this critical to solve for claude code, but not for all the other harnesses which have all converged on AGENTS.md for this purpose?

                • arcfour · 18 hours ago

                  Okay, so we agree that this fix isn't quite as simple as it sounds then, yes? We've just had 3+ paragraphs of discussion around potential edge cases and additional considerations beyond "read one of two files."

                  • lunar_mycroft · 17 hours ago

                    We've had a long discussion only because you refuse to admit that a very simple solution would work (despite completely failing to show how it wouldn't). The problem is that your opinion is not in fact proof that you're right.

                    • arcfour · 16 hours ago

                      I see, well I'm not particularly concerned with being right on this topic (call it a difference of opinion or matter of taste), so I wish you a pleasant day.

          • dylan604 · 18 hours ago

            I've never heard of the 'move fast, break things' mentality ever giving a damn about number of users. If so, no changes would ever be made. The great thing about having millions of users is QA can be eliminated entirely as you'll start hearing about issues from the users directly.

            • troupo · 13 hours ago

              Strange then that Anthropic answers to all user issues with complete derision

          • amluto · 18 hours ago

            Frontier lab AI agent tools break their users’ workflows worse than this on a regular basis.

            • arcfour · 18 hours ago

              What's your point? Nobody can hold themselves to a higher standard because they didn't in the past?

          • dotancohen · 18 hours ago

            Bash does this well, reading only the first of half a dozen config file locations it searches. And if the user needs it to read from an additional location, just add a source line to that location.

          • 0x457 · 9 hours ago

            > This line of thinking is something you will quickly be disabused of once you try supporting software that hundreds of millions of people use. > And I say this as someone that loves the Unix philosophy dearly. Unix way would be just to tell users to `ln -s` and stop bothering with this.

      • epihelix · 19 hours ago

        > Having a kill switch for the change is a perfectly reasonable safety measure in case something goes horribly wrong. What, exactly, is going to go horribly wrong here ...? The worst case you're proposing is that an Anthropic model acts on AGENTS.md rather than CLAUDE.md. It's not going to be the end of the world; at worst it'll be `git reset --hard HEAD` time. But this wouldn't happen, because: > The correct behaviour in the presence of both files is not obvious, either. It seems extremely obvious to me: the non-breaking change is the right change here. If both exist, Anthropic models continue to use CLAUDE.md and ignore AGENTS.md. This is not rocket science. Why are we overthinking this?

        • vikramkr · 18 hours ago

          Because when you have tons of users ainor fuckuo is a big fuckup and also it's really common to have both claude.md and agents.md and use @ syntax (which lets you reference markdown files when using Claude code, but not other harnesses) so you Claude md looks like ```md @AGENTS.md [Claude specific stuff] ``` And then what happens if someone now puts @syntax in their agents.md triggering a loop etc. It's all vibe coded - including code from days with dumber models - there's gonna be all sorts of dragons under the hood

        • hamburglar · 18 hours ago

          > What, exactly, is going to go horribly wrong here ...? Operating anything at scale teaches you that the universe of “things that can go horribly wrong” has a much better imagination than you. That goes quadruple with complex and squishy reasoning models. I’ve seen a couple of really good examples of what can go wrong in this subthread, the most straightforward of which is that abruptly changing a fundamental behavior can break existing use cases.

      • Wowfunhappy · 19 hours ago

        > 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. I'm this person, I am actively doing this! I have some instructions which the Claude models need and OpenAI models will do by themselves. If the OpenAI models see the Claude instructions, they will go way overboard in a way I don't want. Mind, the change does not affect me at all, because when both instructions are present Claude continues to read CLAUDE.md and Codex continues to read AGENTS.md. But if Claude started preferring AGENTS.md, that would be mildly annoying.

        • californical · 18 hours ago

          Within agents.md, an idea. Feel free to steal if you work on this: Model.Claude*: Do this one thing Model.Claude.Opus.4.8: Extra specific instructions Model.*: This is relevant to everyone Harness.ClaudeCode*: Why not, let’s allow harness specific instructions so you can do things differently depending how you’re working

          • dotancohen · 18 hours ago

            I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously, though, this is a great idea. Good communicators know to tailor their discourse to their audience. LLMs are just as sensitive to small variations in prompts, and just as inconsistent between them, as are humans.

          • Wowfunhappy · 17 hours ago

            It's not a bad idea, although at that point it probably shouldn't be a .md file anymore. You'd want to use YAML or something.

            • markhahn · 17 hours ago

              careful, that might lead to programming. using, you know, a programming language.

            • californical · 16 hours ago

              Sorry how about this: # Models.Claude\*: Maybe now it can be in a .md again :D

          • everforward · 17 hours ago

            I did this at one point with Jinja templates. I wrote an agent launcher sort of bash script. Pass in the command to start the agent, the script checks if there’s a Jinja file in a special directory matching that name, and builds it to AGENTS.md. Then it launches the agent. I was trying to use it as a sort of janky RAG. I had a bunch of snippets (one for DB architecture, one for how load balancing works, etc), and my Jinja files were mostly a list of snippets to pull in. Voila, a bunch of agents that share little pieces of info but have a single source of truth. I never got a ton of value tbh, it was very good at just grepping the snippets.

      • bakugo · 19 hours ago

        This "tiny feature" consists of hundreds of lines of code spread across 57 source files, many of which are less than 30 lines long, often contain more comments than code, and have no real reason to exist. It's the very definition of overengineering and overcomplexity. That said, I do find it somewhat funny that Anthropic themselves are falling victim to their own model's tokenmaxxing.

      • speleding · 18 hours ago

        The Claude sandbox has a slightly different ENV compared to ChatGPT (LC_CTYPE set to C instead of UTF8 I believe) which upsets some scripts we have. So in the CLAUDE.MD we tell it about that and then tell it continue reading AGENTS.MD. Not very hard to work around if CLAUDE.MD goes away, but just to support your point that the split did have its uses for some.

      • dotancohen · 18 hours ago

        > Having a kill switch for the change is a perfectly reasonable safety measure in case something goes horribly wrong. Having a way for the user to revert the update is a perfectly reasonable safety measure in case something goes horribly wrong. Even though Anthropic or any other software provider could technically run anything on our system, there exists a modicum of trust between supplier and user. Anthropic performing arbitrary changes that are tangential but not specific to the premise of delivering a harness to package code files and prompts in context to their LLM breaks that trust for many users.

    • chrisweekly · 19 hours ago

      With apologies for not just testing this myself (currently AFK), doesn't it still work to have a CLAUDE.md file containing just `@AGENTS.md`?

    • chrisjj · 19 hours ago

      > Do you really need a whole plugin system Vibe-coding gotta vibe-code.

    • bakugo · 19 hours ago

      Go download the leaked source code from earlier this year, search for all occurrences of the string `CLAUDE.md`, and be horrified.

    • flippingheck · 18 hours ago

      At $FAANG, ~all changes go through feature flags. 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.

      • dotancohen · 17 hours ago

        I'd love to hear more about this. Though I usually write bespoke software for specific clients, I'm about to release my first general-availability application. It's a rust application with Python GUI on the desktop (Linux, Mac, Windows) and a skinny Android application that wraps the rust on mobile. I'm going to be gating features starting probably next week. I'd love to hear tips and experience for implementing feature flags, for both the desktop and mobile space. Thanks!

    • rmnclmnt · 18 hours ago

      Welcome to SWE in 2026

    • verdverm · 18 hours ago

      need to, no, but if you put the Ai to task, expect over engineering

    • wldcordeiro · 17 hours ago

      We've just had a file called `.rules` that is symlink as `AGENTS.md`, `CLAUDE.md`, etc to support the 3 or so common ones used around our projects.

    • sebmellen · 15 hours ago

      I always point people back to https://grugbrain.dev . The worst thing about AI is endless complexity slopification.

    • pasteleft · 14 hours ago

      I'm not sure why they didn't just extend plugins, but having mod support is definitely a plus for everyone. AGENTS.md seems to simply showcase what mods are capable of.

  • d5lt5 · 19 hours ago

    Sounds like you've read the deepseek harness paper.

  • dybber · 19 hours ago

    Will you extend your plugin to read skills and rules from `.agents`? Or should we write our own plugin/mod for that?

  • amluto · 18 hours ago

    I skimmed a couple pages of the docs at: 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.

    • kaszanka · 18 hours ago

      If the direct link isn't working for anyone else (looks like it's some AWS pre-signed one maybe tied to IP): https://github.com/user-attachments/files/31802150/EXTERNAL....

    • dogleash · 18 hours ago

      > 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. 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.

    • mpoteat · 18 hours ago

      Ouch! Much of this verbiage was dictated by me personally; I just have a fairly distinct register some might consider inscrutable. My English teachers in grade school always said the same :) 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?

      • amluto · 17 hours ago

        Your comment here is written in perfectly fine English :) Maybe "function_hook_modules" for the JSON key? Does this finally fix the limitation that there is no supportable way to replace the implementation of a native tool in Claude Code? codex-rs has an (undocumented but likely supportable if kind of awkward) mechanism, and I’m part way through a project that needs this. I was going to release it with a recommendation not to use Claude Code, but it’s at least plausible that this will change my mind. (I’m not sure yet — the $ mechanism might be too restrictive. It’s a start at least.)

        • amluto · 14 hours ago

          Having given the JSON more than two seconds of thought, I have a very different suggestion: { "function_hooks": { "version": 1, "source_file": "./whatever.ts", "language": "TypeScript", "hash": "sha256:abcd..." } } Don't trust my formatting -- I typed this in the comment box and I have not run it through a prettifier or anything. The point here is that there's a world adjacent to but not actually contained within Claude Code in which not everything blindly trusts everything else, and maybe it's time to start remembering some lessons from the 90's on. For example: - Don't sniff content types and preferably don't infer them from filenames either. - Don't trust your subresource to arrive intact. Pin those hashes and verify them! - Leave some room for extensibility. - Maybe don't require everyone to mix their code with the security policy that controls edits to that code? I realize that anyone cursed with GitHub Actions is forced to violate this rule in the most outrageous ways imaginable, but that doesn't mean that Claude Code needs to follow suit forever. Once there's subresource integrity, the actual subresource can be put somewhere else where it belongs better. If there's "source_file", in the future there can be "source_url" and such without trying to infer it from the formatting of the string. (I've involved absolutely no AI in the preparation of this comment. I make plenty of use of AI, but I like my brain to stay exercised, and I like to think that I remain MUCH better at this kind of thing than even the best current models.)

          • hluska · 7 hours ago

            For someone so pedantic, your writing is remarkably poor.

      • xena · 17 hours ago

        Contact me at the email address in my HN account and we can arrange for a human with a soul and feelings to write the docs from scratch assuming you have a price in mind that values the nature of my talent and experience.

        • mpoteat · 17 hours ago

          Wow, you're Xe Iaso! I've reached out.

      • massagedpelican · 16 hours ago

        Out of curiosity, I ran the PDF through pangram and it seemed to flag nearly the entire thing as AI. I recognize these aren't perfect detectors, but they can give signals if nothing else. Perhaps it needs more soul injected! https://www.pangram.com/history/93f9ec71-f7b3-4680-86b1-ff12...

        • KurtMueller · 15 hours ago

          Perhaps these "ai detectors" are snake oil

          • sebmellen · 15 hours ago

            There’s definitely a snake oil component, but Pangram is unbelievably accurate. Creepily so in my opinion

            • computomatic · 10 hours ago

              How do you evaluate that?

              • sebmellen · 7 hours ago

                Well, I've tried to get around it for our corporate SEO blogging strategy, and I've found that it's just not possible to do it (even with really crazy techniques where you have different models combined to produce the output, or you change your prompting style massively). The minute I take the same article that the LLM gave me and I rewrite it in my own voice (meaning just take the information and topics, but rewrite it from scratch), the post works immediately and passes as 100% human on Pangram. The only thing that gets around that is StealthGPT, but it mangles your intent in the output so badly that it's easier to just write the thing yourself.

        • karagenit · 14 hours ago

          Yeah, this doc is really interesting. It has some absolutely claude-fried lines like: > A hook is Koa-style middleware: it reifies an endomorphic continuation > Five forms, each on tool.call; But on the other hand uses distinctly human phrases like “one may” and “etc./e.g.” that I rarely see LLMs use. Not sure what to think.

          • echoangle · 14 hours ago

            Maybe Claude is RLHFd primarily on texts by mpoteat and that’s why it talks this way

            • thinkingemote · 13 hours ago

              I know it's a joke but if you look at many of the key AI researchers papers (written pre-LLM mass adoption) you can see some similarities with how LLMs structure their output. I'd love to do some stylometry on this...

          • bmitc · 8 hours ago

            I have found that Opus 5 and Fable love bringing up category theory at the drop of a hat.

      • arbot360 · 15 hours ago

        Not beating the allegations on "Claude doesn't speak human because Anthropic employees don't speak human."

      • SupLockDef · 13 hours ago

        I am going to be called on that one, but I have to call on your bullshit here. You didn't write this.

      • crooked-v · 13 hours ago

        It's a register that would be great for some tabletop games or pop science writing, but in this context it could really use a technical editor to aggressively remove phrasing like "keeping the fold neatly uniform" and "affordance surface", as well as change things like "hooks live in a hooks.json file, today of four extant types" into plain technical language ("there are four types of hook that can be defined in hooks.json").

      • ipsi · 12 hours ago

        > Ouch! Much of this verbiage was dictated by me personally; I just have a fairly distinct register some might consider inscrutable. I do notice that the more Claude-generated stuff I read, the more it creeps into my daily usage, and I suspect I don't read nearly as much of it as an Anthropic Employee would, so I could believe that. Though "much of" isn't the same as "written with zero AI generation/rephrasing/etc." Anyway, that aside, something I would like to see is an example of something that's possible with this system that isn't, or isn't easily , possible with existing Claude hooks. Right now it reads like "Here's a cool thing! Here's how it works! And here's this other similar system we have! Here's how that works!" But there's no summary of the differences, why I'd use this over regular hooks, and so on. Or at least not that I saw on quick skim, and I'd be looking for that to be mentioned as early as possible, so I know if the rest is worth reading.

      • ApatheticCosmos · 10 hours ago

        What if we have it all backwards? What if Claude-speak, as some like to call it, is actually caused by this one dude dictating the documentation?

        • datadrivenangel · 9 hours ago

          her writing style isn't normally this claudish though!

        • nextaccountic · 5 hours ago

          Well regardless of the origins of Claude-speak, I'm sure millions of humans are picking up some of its idioms, and at least some fraction of it will enter standard English in some decades

      • hluska · 7 hours ago

        Your writing is fine, documentation is hard and nobody is perfect at launch. I can all but guarantee I have more editing experience than the commenter and trust me, you’re fine.

    • JDups · 13 hours ago

      Writing documentation is one of the most often mentioned uses of LLMs. I suppose if Anthropic wouldn't be doing it it would put into question why anyone else would.

    • hluska · 7 hours ago

      I’m curious… would you talk to them like this in person? The only ‘egregious’ thing I read here was your reaction. Maybe you could consider acting more human?

    • yearolinuxdsktp · 6 hours ago

      Here's a palatable, clear version: https://pdfhost.io/v/2CVhPGy9Kw_CLEAR_Function_Hooks_Core_Ar...

  • 63stack · 18 hours ago

    >via our new extensibility system for CC, called Mods, which is launching soon-ish. A mod is a plugin with a new type of hook, which we call a function hook. 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?

  • c0rruptbytes · 18 hours ago

    mods seem like a grasp at all the pi and dsh users

  • glub · 17 hours ago

    I've developed several plugins for different harnesses, and I needed some upstream change for most of them. 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.

  • crooked-v · 14 hours ago

    This may or may not be related, but if you're working on CC, who do we have to annoy to make Anthropic stop trying to force use of arbitrary Bash commands instead of the actual tool calls built into the harness? ( https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/90450 , https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/89251 , etc) It's deeply infuriating at times that there's this full system of hooks, permissions, etc that's unusable at times because CC keeps trying to make the model not use any of it.

  • troupo · 14 hours ago

    > The AGENTS.md support was implemented via our new extensibility system for CC, called Mods, AKA "we need 100~ish files wrtitten in the most horrible Clean Code style replete with no two files agreeing on the same naming of the same feature... to read one of two files, one of which has been a de-facto industry standard for over two years"

• michaellee8 · 20 hours ago

  Really loved this Tibo-level responsiveness, if Anthropic can keep it up with this level of service, I am pretty sure a lot of people will just ditch their ChatGPT subscription and just move to Claude.

  • d5lt5 · 20 hours ago

    On the other hand, if Anthropic is to follow the industry standards, this would never have happened in the first place. It's not like the feature gates are the frontier of software development.

    • bpodgursky · 19 hours ago

      This is the most symbolic and unimportant change in history (you can literally just symlink), I think people will be fine.

      • d5lt5 · 19 hours ago

        Symlink requires admin, and most people do not run CC as admin with bypass permissions though.

        • bpodgursky · 19 hours ago

          Right... you can just do it yourself.

        • arcfour · 19 hours ago

          ? You need root to run ln? Since when?

          • farlight · 19 hours ago

            On Windows you do. If you have to suffer it for some reason.

            • arcfour · 19 hours ago

              Ah, right. Windows... Does that apply to WSL? I would assume everyone develops on WSL these days if they have to use Windows, at least...

              • d5lt5 · 18 hours ago

                There is a very valid reason on Windows not to allow people to do 'ln -s' without an admin. WSL also has a huge perf hit when you cross FS boundary, but perhaps you have never experienced it, because you said, "Ah, right. Windows..." But at least you've heard about WSL!

                • arcfour · 18 hours ago

                  Yes, I prefer to use functional operating systems, or at least ones I can fix myself, without incurring a "huge performance hit" by wrapping them in spyware disguised as an OS ;-)

                  • d5lt5 · 16 minutes ago

                    Maybe you can link your PRs where you fixed the system. Or maybe you are just another brainwashed person who decided to follow the flock/horde, because OS'es are not about emotions, but about getting stuff done. If you feel emotional about the tool, I have bad news for you, and good news for your future therapist.

    • vikramkr · 18 hours ago

      There are two or three relevant companies in this space in America and this is the one of them that kicked off the whole terminal agent harness thing in getting market adoption. It's perfectly fine for neither of these companies to follow industry standards while they're figuring shit out

  • BowBun · 19 hours ago

    Because they respond to HN threads about their products? Which are likely Claude hooks monitoring for activity in the first place? Come on... At least make an argument for switching vendors based on the quality or price of their service.

    • user43928 · 19 hours ago

      After I was mildly disappointed with GPT-6 Sol and Luna not improving intelligence and only cutting the price, I'm running Opus 5.5 today. 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'.

      • dannyw · 15 hours ago

        Don’t make too quick snap judgements. “Honeymooning”, or giving new subscriptions / upgrades extra usage or “juice” is pretty common industry practice amongst SaaS “growth hacking” for years. Sadly.

  • m3kw9 · 19 hours ago

    Sure a fast response on HN would make people switch. Try better rates, infra, limits etc.

  • cowboylowrez · 19 hours ago

    What we need is a low level but constant drumbeat against openai in general. In general the AI situation is overleveraged and underpoliced, with the occasional hints of AI gone wild. If openai were to just be left to die, we could let that financial mess unroll and bail out the leftovers, I don't like bailouts anymore than the next guy but with this administration its almost a guarantee if things go south because this adminstration can charge administrative fees of maybe $20-30 billion (which goes to trump), get Sam Altman to serve one or two years in a cushy resort type fed place for the hugging face hacking and put openai's processes on github as a premium feature, say $10000 a month to access (which again goes to trump). 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?

  • jimmaswell · 18 hours ago

    Why would I ever do that to myself? My experience with Codex/GPT is fantastic, while my impression of Claude/Opus is that it's longwinded, patronizing, token-inefficient, stops to ask stupid questions every other minute, overcomplicates simple tasks, often poor engineering overall. I don't use it but this is what I see my partner run into who has access to both and compares them often. She has the same assessment.

    • enraged_camel · 18 hours ago

      Wow, thanks for sharing your experience. Very insightful.

    • michaellee8 · 18 hours ago

      Cuz OpenAI has been secretly downgrading models on many accounts, including mine lately. I paid $200 a month since like gpt-5.4, and since Astra released I found the model is somehow acting strange, it is until I checked X I have discovered that OAI is giving Luna level models when I am requesting Sol/Astra, or some piece of s** that is even worse than Luna. I basically had to ran every session with a Pelican test to determine if that session is safe. So I just spun up my Claude $20 and figured that now I can get all the work done just with Opus 5. Let me show you a pelican, by "gpt-6-sol". Cutting usages is one thing, but secretly downgrading models to a level that is not reliable anymore is the last straw. I am not saying other frontier labs (I am talking about you Anthropic) isn't doing this, but their version of downgraded/quantized/reduced effort model is at least usable, probably just slightly dumber, OAI's differences is day and night. https://imgur.com/a/PDbYdOQ

      • jimmaswell · 17 hours ago

        Somehow this just hasn't happened to me. I use Astra on high all day for fairly intensive game dev tasks, sometimes cranked up depending on the task. I have heard ultra thinking might delegate to worse agents for some of its sub-tasks, but I don't use that much anymore since Astra came out. Just high seems good enough to throw most laundry lists at.

        • dannyw · 15 hours ago

          It’s more likely that GP encountered some bug or corner case or weird experiment conflating than anything intentionally deceptive. There’s also the fact that LLMs aren’t perfect, and sometimes even the best models act really stupid sometimes.

      • nullbio · 17 hours ago

        It's night and day difference, for 3 days, until Anthropic nerf the model.

      • troupo · 13 hours ago

        > Cuz OpenAI has been secretly downgrading models on many accounts, including mine lately. Same with Anthropic. On top of that Anthropic rarely or ever admits any issues, and even if they do, you get like 6 hours of reset. Rmemeber March?

  • serf · 18 hours ago

    > ...if Anthropic can keep it up with this level of service... 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.

    • scottyah · 16 hours ago

      So money is all that matters to you? Must be an OpenAI employee or user.

      • AlexErrant · 11 hours ago

        "No bitch, that's a whole new sentence."

  • nozzlegear · 16 hours ago

    Do yourself a favor: ditch both and go local.

    • evilduck · 11 hours ago

      Local is becoming ever increasingly scarce and cost prohibitive. It's kind of bleak out there right now. A minimum bar to entry for decent local AI (something that can run a 27B tier model with some reasonable context) is going to set you back a year or five worth of AI API token costs.

• grim_io · 20 hours ago

  The same guy writing readme's for my vibeslopped toy projects is also the readme writer at Anthropic, what a coincidence ;)

• Maxion · 20 hours ago

  Well now, this is how you do community outreach

• aviperl · 20 hours ago

  Ouch. I've had to send such messages, but internally at work, not on HN! Have a great day, human.

• OtherShrezzing · 20 hours ago

  >Apologies again folks, this was a fully human error on my part Blink twice if you need help

  • anon48293 · 19 hours ago

    Or add one additional telemetry metric and an extra prompt

    • callmeal · 15 hours ago

      don't forget the "auto reset all consent flags to 'allowed'" oopsie bug.

• fg137 · 20 hours ago

  > a fully human error Would be interesting to know how much time you/your team spent on that design decision

  • rachr · 19 hours ago

    The correct design was in the AGENTS.md but they didn't have telemetry on

• senko · 19 hours ago

  I hope disabling /r if telemetry is disabled is also unintentional...

• mort96 · 19 hours ago

  "Rollout artifact"? This is Claude-speak isn't it? I have never ever heard anyone call a bug like this a "rollout artifact" before.

  • ako · 19 hours ago

    I was probably an agent that made the change, and the same agent that commented here on HN.

  • criley2 · 19 hours ago

    I don't think "bug" is the correct term. They put a feature behind a feature flag, and feature flags don't work if you turn them off (via telemetry). That's "Working As Designed™".

    • mort96 · 19 hours ago

      It's clearly an unintended interaction. Nobody intended for the telemetry switch to control whether it reads AGENTS.md (hence mpoteat's apologetic response). Whether you consider that to be a "bug" or not really wasn't the point of my message.

      • _vertigo · 18 hours ago

        Clearly not Claude-speak, see the rest of the message. "Rollout artifact" just means "an artifact of how we rolled this change out" which maybe isn't proper English but the message was obviously not written by Claude. Upgrade your Claudish detection

      • quintu5 · 15 hours ago

        It’s a long-standing issue that disabling telemetry disabled feature-flagged features (e.g., remote control).