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...

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lunar_mycroft 2 hours 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?

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arcfour an hour 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."

	▲	lunar_mycroft 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		We've had a long discussion only because you refuse to admit that a very simple solution would work (despite completely failing to show how it wouldn't). The problem is that your opinion is not in fact proof that you're right.

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dylan604 2 hours 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.

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arcfour an hour 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?

	▲	dylan604 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Is the level of HN discourse suggesting that having a large number of users worth of never making simple changes something you want? This isn't a move fast break things suggestion, this is a rational common sense suggestion. Instead, you're pushing an overly complex way of implementing something that would allow for all sorts of unknowns. Earlier comments suggesting this new mods concept was being worked on giving the dev a new 20lb sledge hammer so the CLAUDE/AGENTS situation suddenly got beat on like it was a railroad spike when it just needed a smaller hammer since it was only a finishing nail.

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bakugo 2 hours 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 an hour 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.