Comment by arcfour
4 days 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.
4 days 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.
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...
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?
3 replies →
> 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.
3 replies →
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.
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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.