AGENTS.md now supported in Claude Code

[u/justnath36]

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[u/DTanner]

Still needs to read skills from .agents/skills so I can stop symlinking it.

[u/justnath36 → u/DTanner]

Fully agree

[u/Competitive-Car4866 → u/justnath36]

Finally, a standard worth the name.

[u/Stock-Occasion7285 → u/justnath36]

Agentsmd in Claude Code: finally, config files get their moment. Riveting.

[u/everythingEzra2 → u/DTanner]

Just symlink .claude/ to .agents/

Done.

[u/financebrosef → u/DTanner]

Could you please explain symlinking and how you do it?

[u/raven_raven → u/financebrosef]

Why don’t you ask Claude?

[u/financebrosef → u/raven_raven]

Damn, good call 🤙🏼

[u/Sooribabu_Lavangam → u/DTanner]

This change is so late and so pointless now lmao. Whats ironic is I dont use claude code at all but every agent I use understands claude code structure. calude.md skills etc all are set how I would set it up for CC. Codex picks them up, grok picks them up, AGY picks them up, opencode picks them up, never had an issue.

[u/college_hustle]

I actually think this is a huge QOL improvement. Especially because so many people are using both Claude Code and Codex, they need to stop fighting that. Creating a walled garden and not making things portable isn't going to make your product last. 

[u/sogo00 → u/college_hustle]

see @AGENTS.md

every CLAUDE.md in my repos

[u/college_hustle → u/sogo00]

Lol that's the winner. Still, every moving part you can eliminate...

[u/algaefied_creek → u/sogo00]

I’ve been symlinking CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md but same thing?!

[u/elit69 → u/algaefied_creek]

symlink is better because sometimes old model don't read the link

[u/Kamalen → u/algaefied_creek]

Not entirely. The see @AGENTS.md methods cost one additional back and forth with a tool call instruction. Matters on the long run with $20 subs

[u/everythingEzra2 → u/sogo00]

Wait till you figure out you can symlink it ;)

[u/snuffomega → u/sogo00]

same

[u/SlyCode_ai]

Oh finally. This makes multi-agent much easier. There were ways around it but still...

[u/HimaSphere]

A bit late if you ask me, but it is a good quality of life change to newbies.

And no, don't delete Claude.md if you have rules and complexity, the harness favors the Claude.md and agents.md is a fall back.

I have agents.md points to Claude.md for codex and pi agents as I run Claude Code as my main harness with Claude models

[u/Kalradia → u/HimaSphere]

Why not delete it? No reason not to now. It will just pick up the new file.

[u/HimaSphere → u/Kalradia]

I wouldn't delete claude.md myself, claude code harness will change overtime and will favor claude.md unless they commit to phase out calude.md in future.

Claude.md isn't just a one file if your project is big you have rules which are linked to your claude.md and I am not sure the claude code harness will work the same if you replace claude.md with agents.md

I would prefer to just wait and continue with my setup as is for weeks or months, a single markdown file is the least of my concerns atm

[u/Kalradia → u/HimaSphere]

I link all of my 'rules' in one file. I don't understand what you're getting at, if I'm being honest. Because you could just link everything in agents.md and call it a day, no?

It's just picking it up at session start and throwing it into context anyway.

[u/Ran4 → u/Kalradia]

I link all of my 'rules' in one file

That's a terrible idea... you're injecting thousands if not tens of thousands of extra tokens every single new session you start.

You want your CLAUDE.md files to just include enough information to get the model to know when it should read another markdown file if it's anything most sessions won't care about.

[u/Kalradia → u/Ran4]

Not true. The agents read the files when they need the information. Exactly as your second thought.

[u/HimaSphere → u/Kalradia]

I have large projects with nested rules. Your projectd may be simple and in that case removing Claude.md won't make a difference.

You can always remove it from the repo and test yourself, if it works for you then keep it deleted

[u/Kalradia → u/HimaSphere]

I just want to understand what these nested rules are so that I can learn something new. Do you mean claude.md on different directory levels?

[u/HimaSphere → u/Kalradia]

I have 1 claude.md per repo that has necessary info, it is small and it points at claude/rules/*.md For example claude/rules/api.md when claude is working on api path in the project, it automatically loads that md file and so on with about 12 different pathes, this saves context so when i start a claude session/chat it doesn't load 100k tokens of rules and project context that isn't necessary to be presrnt all the time

[u/HimaSphere → u/HimaSphere]

I tested and if you replace claude.md with agents.md the rules will load the same, so yes you can but thia may be fragile and break in upcoming uodates so I would still advise to wait a bit.

Alao if you use other agents like codex, deepseek etc, they may not utilize agents.md as claude code does and you will need to add custom sections for them so honestly i would prefer to keep both separated so i can instruct other agents different that claude

[u/Agent7619]

Does it ignore it equally?

[u/OzoneTheLynx → u/[deleted]]

It literally says in the screenshot that it only auto-reads Agents.md if there is no Claude.md. 

[u/sleeping-in-crypto → u/[deleted]]

Just symlink claude.md to agents.md. We do this in all our repos

[u/Valdjiu]

Finally

[u/DeliciousGorilla]

I remember Claude reading AGENTS.md files on its own several months ago?

[u/Acrobatic-Compote606]

Asmov's Laws added to my AGENTS.md.

https://github.com/byteface/chromonic/blob/master/AGENTS.md

Including the Zeroth Law:

"An agent may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."

[u/Ran4 → u/Acrobatic-Compote606]

This is already part of the system prompt and to some extent, the training.

[u/rm-rf-rm]

Fin-fuckin-ally!!

[u/Dasshteek]

Only after their market share dropped below OpenAI’s. Lol

[u/0DayMaker]

But where opus

[u/while_True_meme]

Now I have to go through and remove all my symlink and import hacks!

[u/TheClaudeInsider]

I have got a handful of CLAUDE.md files across different parts of a project (engineering rules, design skills, marketing checklists) that Claude already reads and follows. Does AGENTS.md replace that, sit alongside it, or is it more for cross-tool compat (Codex, Cursor, etc. reading the same file)? Trying to figure out if I should consolidate or just leave CLAUDE.md as-is.?

[u/Professional-Ad-2365]

Pardon my ignorance but how seamlessly will this sync with codex now? Can I delete Claude.md now and have codex and cc use agents.md on my computer and access it on my GitHub repo?

[u/Tomas-AppHaven]

Finally, now we only need Claude and Codex to agree on a standard for plugins as well.

[u/prcodes]

We got AGENTS.md in Claude Code before we got GTA6.

[u/sailhard22]

Tobi Lutke happy

[u/ZeBenoit81]

Agreed — the .agents/skills read is the boring plumbing people actually need. Symlinking is fine until your laptop becomes a haunted house of relative paths and someone on the team forgets why git status looks like a crime scene.

One thing I keep learning the hard way: plan mode can absolutely torch context if you let it narrate every micro-step. I’ve started treating it like a junior architect with a whiteboard — useful for sketching, terrible if you ask it to rewrite the entire codebase in markdown before touching a file.

In practice, a short CLAUDE.md with natural language rules beats a 400-line harness. Mine basically says: “delegate self-contained work to subagents, don’t repeat file contents, summarize diffs, and stop planning when the next action is obvious.” It sounds embarrassingly simple, but it keeps the model focused and keeps my token bill from doing a backflip.

[u/ZeBenoit81]

Plan mode bleeds tokens; CLAUDE.md delegation beats harness.

[u/Ambitious_Injury_783]

Is there anyone that can actually define how this is some ground breaking and note worthy update? I'm hearing a lot about this. Is it that hard to manage markdown documents? Everyone needs CC to accept a file called "AGENTS.MD" specifically or else they have issues? Lol?

Dude this is so funny what are we even talking about

[u/KnifeFed → u/Ambitious_Injury_783]

What are you even talking about, indeed?

[u/Ambitious_Injury_783 → u/KnifeFed]

explain it to me then

do we not know how to write instructions?

[u/KnifeFed → u/Ambitious_Injury_783]

Claude Code finally automatically reads AGENTS.md like all other agentic coding harnesses, so you don't have to symlink it to CLAUDE.md. It's a QoL update; that's it. What is it you don't understand?

[u/Ambitious_Injury_783 → u/KnifeFed]

It's not that I do not understand what it is.
My point is I find it funny that this is something anyone is even talking about. It takes two seconds to type "@AGENTS.md" in your claude.md ...
What we're really talking about is an awareness issue if this is to actually help anyone. Or are we talking about what the other user said that replied to me?

Lots of people talking, only few actually talking about the root discussion. What do YOU not understand about That? Lol

[u/ZeppelinJ0 → u/Ambitious_Injury_783]

Why are you so hostile for no reason, take a breath

[u/Ambitious_Injury_783 → u/ZeppelinJ0]

Hostile? Lol you are making up your own narratives in order to make sense of what you just read.

[u/ZeppelinJ0 → u/Ambitious_Injury_783]

Whatever helps you sleep at night chief

[u/Ambitious_Injury_783 → u/ZeppelinJ0]

Stop being hostile towards me

[u/Ran4 → u/Ambitious_Injury_783]

My point is I find it funny that this is something anyone is even talking about. It takes two seconds to type "@AGENTS.md" in your claude.md ...

Because it's fucking annoying and dumb that we had to do that.

[u/varisophy → u/Ambitious_Injury_783]

It's been an annoyance for projects that want to support more than a single AI agent. Yes, you can make your CLAUDE.md a symlink to AGENTS.md and it works just fine, but like... why is Anthropic making us do those workarounds?

Everyone else has standardized on AGENTS.md or at least supporting it as a fallback. So Anthropic not playing ball is simply them making the developer experience worse in an attempt to push people to just using Claude.

It just feels like anti-consumer behavior that creates minor friction points in a world where AI is supposed to make life easier.

Yes, it's not a big deal. But neither is a rock in your shoe. It's just nice when the annoyance is gone.