Claude is also weird for being the only coding assistant that for some reason doesn't support AGENTS.md. Codex, Amp, Cursor all of them support it and read from it, but not claude which forces it's users to use CLAUDE.md instead.
I beg people to learn what symlinks are. The fact that "put @AGENTS.md in there" is a "common workaround" shows why programmers (good ones at least) are not going anywhere soon.
I used to use a symlink but was concerned that Claude might see the presence of an "AGENTS.md" file (in e.g, a "List Files" tool call output or from a direct `ls`), be curious and attempt to read it directly (not knowing that it's the same as the "CLAUDE.md" file auto-injected by the harness), and essentially double the token impact / context bloat. Indeed, I did some local experimentation and noticed this was the case, which is why I switched to the explicit "@AGENTS.md" approach.
Your solution "appears" to solve the problem, but without any information about how exactly that solution works, it's just magic an vibes.
Does the harness parse the contents of CLAUDE.md, see the @AGENTS.md and then inject the contents of AGENTS.md into that file with a note saying "hey Claude-the-llm, here's the contents of AGENTS.md per an @reference"? Does the harness parse and inject but WITHOUT any ceremony telling claude-the-llm that what it's looking at is from another file? Or does the harness do nothing and Claude-the-llm is merely trained to see @references and treat those as "I should go read that file"? Which is it? If it's #1 and #3, then on long contexts/after compaction, then the LLM is still pretty likely to lose the fact that it read that file and re-read it again. If it's #2, the LLM could have the same problem as with the symlinks.
How does it work? The Anropic docs certainly don't say. So what's the best choice? I guess it's magic. For folks like me who care though, I guess there's always Pi or Opencode (or even, writing your own harness [which is shockingly easy if you want it reliable without all the fanciest features]).
why over complicate it? the answer is obviously yes? it sees it and reads the file? might it sometimes not? yeah, just like every other thing you write in agents.md or the prompt. if you want to write a more verbose statement telling it to read the other file do so. or if you really want to make damn sure it read what you wrote, then symlink it, because it does in fact read the thing twice.
Not amazing enough. Let me present you claude-md-symlinker [1], an 8k-lines Rust project designed to do exactly the same as a symlink but in an obscure manner, running as a Linux service and maintaining its own database. This is like left_pad but for symlinks.
A few years ago I noticed a junior dev was creating a lot of one-file, two-branch git repositories and I asked him why. He said he wanted to run a diff on two versions of a file that wasn't in version control, so he would make a branch with each version and run git diff.
What’s actually better is doing a symlink by hand. 1- if you didn’t know it you learn what’s a symlink; 2- if that’s in a git repo you share it with all your coworkers without all of them needing to install the plugin; 3- security-wise it’s way better than running some 100+ lines of Bash from a repo on GitHub.
Maybe I'm just not aware enough to notice any quality degradation, but I've been using Claude Code in repos that only have AGENTS.md and it just generally seems to know to read it when getting its bearings.
Not that Claude Code is much better, I just hit this issue[1] because it seems setting DO_NOT_TRACK=1 seems enough to get a really strange behavior in the newest versions of CC.
> I'm not exactly building TUI's every day, but even i felt pain when i read that "small game engine" post
The bigger issue is they where somehow thinking it was "cool" and "advanced" while it's just a kludgy rube-goldbergy monstrous hack.
Which is of course only semi-working: to me the model thinking what you see is what it outputs in the TUI is the deal-breaker for me. It's of course not working like that for they're apparently, in their "game engine", converting on the fly a headless browser to approximated characters to display in the terminal. So the model tells you he did output ASCII but people are copy/pasting (because, yes, at times you want to copy/paste) Unicode chars.
Plenty of bug reports and pissed users.
That's the bigger issue.
The biggest issue is those thinking a 10 GB VM required to run a headless Electron browser and then fuxx0ring characters conversion is somehow an achievement.
Was it Casey Muratori that spoke about an AI educing allocations from 10k per frame to 200 per frame, but the manual programming work got it to 0 instead?
At least game engines manage to render their frames properly. Claude Code sometimes eats entire paragraphs of text output, resulting in things such as numbered lists jumping from 2 to 4 out of nowhere.
I'd just ask Claude to repeat himself at first but it happens so often that I actually made a little tool to dig up the output inside the session history and present it properly in a separate terminal.
Right, just yesterday I found my laptop kinda hot. And what do you think, it was good old Claude deciding to load a few cores with completely idling prompts.
Yeah, somehow claude-cli sitting in a tmux session doing nothing uses my laptops battery twice as fast. Powertop suggests a ton of wakeups, but why? Is it busy polling the input or something?
Surprisingly Kiro is fine (I work at Amazon but not at all on the Kiro team). I prefer it to anything else I've tried (except Amazon Q Developer in IntelliJ, but it's now deprecated).
Kiro is surprisingly good, if the interface for saving and resuming was slightly more reliable, and there was the hope of remote sessions, I'd probably switch to it full time. I vastly prefer it to having to fight against buggy force-fed features like UltraPlan or whatever.
How are they iterating? I've not noticed anything major changing between the versions of my claude code. Other than that sometimes this version includes /btw and sometimes it's missing.
Woah, let's not forget Claude code is right there