Comment by redox99

4 days 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.

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.

  • 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.

    • 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...

      13 replies →

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • > 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.