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redox99 2 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 an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

dotancohen 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

lunar_mycroft an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 an hour ago | parent [-]

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...

lunar_mycroft an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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 minutes ago | parent [-]

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."

dylan604 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

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?

bakugo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

amluto an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

arcfour 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

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

dylan604 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.