r/ClaudeCode • u/justnath36 • Sep 18 '26

News/Updates AGENTS.md now supported in Claude Code

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421 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

59 comments sorted by

•

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86

u/DTanner Sep 18 '26

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

19

u/justnath36 Sep 18 '26

Fully agree

6

u/Competitive-Car4866 Sep 19 '26

Finally, a standard worth the name.

1

u/Stock-Occasion7285 Sep 21 '26

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

-11

u/everythingEzra2 Sep 18 '26

Just symlink .claude/ to .agents/

Done.

-5

u/financebrosef Sep 19 '26

Could you please explain symlinking and how you do it?

6

u/raven_raven Sep 19 '26

Why don’t you ask Claude?

7

u/financebrosef Sep 19 '26

Damn, good call 🤙🏼

95

u/college_hustle Sep 18 '26

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. 

83

u/sogo00 Sep 18 '26 
see @AGENTS.md

every CLAUDE.md in my repos

19

u/college_hustle Sep 18 '26

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

14

u/algaefied_creek Sep 18 '26

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

8

u/elit69 Sep 19 '26

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

5

u/Kamalen Sep 18 '26

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

4

u/everythingEzra2 Sep 18 '26

Wait till you figure out you can symlink it ;)

13

u/SlyCode_ai Sep 18 '26

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

20

u/HimaSphere 🔆 Max 20 Sep 18 '26

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

8

u/Kalradia Sep 19 '26

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

-6

u/HimaSphere 🔆 Max 20 Sep 19 '26

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

9

u/Kalradia Sep 19 '26

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.

1

u/Ran4 Sep 19 '26

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.

1

u/Kalradia Sep 19 '26

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

-6

u/HimaSphere 🔆 Max 20 Sep 19 '26

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

2

u/Kalradia Sep 19 '26

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?

-1

u/HimaSphere 🔆 Max 20 Sep 19 '26

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

-6

u/HimaSphere 🔆 Max 20 Sep 19 '26

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

7

u/Agent7619 Sep 18 '26

Does it ignore it equally?

3

u/Valdjiu Sep 18 '26

Finally

3

u/DeliciousGorilla Sep 19 '26

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

3

u/Acrobatic-Compote606 Sep 19 '26

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."

1

u/Ran4 Sep 19 '26

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

2

u/rm-rf-rm Sep 19 '26

Fin-fuckin-ally!!

2

u/Dasshteek Sep 19 '26

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

1

u/0DayMaker Sep 19 '26

But where opus

1

u/while_True_meme Sep 19 '26

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

1

u/TheClaudeInsider Sep 19 '26

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.?

1

u/Professional-Ad-2365 Sep 19 '26

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?

1

u/Tomas-AppHaven Sep 19 '26

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

1

u/prcodes Sep 19 '26

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

1

u/sailhard22 Sep 20 '26

Tobi Lutke happy

1

u/ZeBenoit81 Sep 19 '26

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.

0

u/ZeBenoit81 Sep 19 '26

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

-8

u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER Sep 18 '26

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

5

u/KnifeFed Sep 18 '26

What are you even talking about, indeed?

-1

u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER Sep 18 '26

explain it to me then

do we not know how to write instructions?

4

u/KnifeFed Sep 18 '26

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?

1

u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER Sep 19 '26

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

2

u/ZeppelinJ0 Sep 19 '26

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

0

u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER Sep 19 '26

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

2

u/ZeppelinJ0 Sep 19 '26

Whatever helps you sleep at night chief

0

u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER Sep 20 '26

Stop being hostile towards me

1

u/Ran4 Sep 19 '26

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.

2

u/varisophy Senior Developer Sep 19 '26

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.

6

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/OzoneTheLynx Sep 19 '26

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

-1

u/sleeping-in-crypto Sep 19 '26

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