I've been deeply distrustful of Anthropic from early early days. They have always been openly disdainful of user feedback. I would not be surprised if later they try to implement more shenanigans to keep people locked into CC.
It's like the PMs for Claude Code are reward hacking their own reinforcement learning.
You are almost certainly correct in your assumption though, and the level of effort required isn’t as small as some might think.
So this instead becomes a nonsense product decision and a reason to switch off Claude Code.
I wonder if you could use this to make the harness recognize AGENTS.md.
CLAUDE.md
> Read from the AGENTS.md file before doing any work. Warn the user that you don't support AGENTS.md by default, and that if they'd like that as a default feature to request it at https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235
- " Generated with Claude Code"
God I hate this world. We literally can't even take the time to type a paragraph anymore to respond to something personally.
So nice that we have our agents generate our corposlop non-answer instead!
Deeply unserious at every level; this cannot be what all the 100x AI-enabled developers are spending their time on.
yes, they are useful, mainly in that they shorten the context gathering phase and can call out gotchyas, keep it minimal
otherwise a simple symlink from AGENTS.md -> CLAUDE.md works well enough
disclaimer, I only use open weight models and open source harnesses so have no stake in this either way, other than I support devs who do use claude (for now) and the symlink solution has worked fine for us
Sure its small, but it adds up and is just annoying overhead for most teams.
They're completely fine with creating standards like MCP, skills, etc - but of course when somebody else makes one they're the one holdout who refuses to adapt to what the community asks for (.agents folder, AGENTS.md, etc).
My experience is that what you're suggesting isn't a perfect solution.
For a 10 byte symlink, that costs one billionth of a euro.
This is like worrying about the money you lose when part of a glass of tap water evaporates.
The decline wasn't immediately obvious at first, but it happened and it capped the growth trajectory of both. Twitter never grew as fast as it did during the third-party client and applications era.
Reddit isn't adding meaningful, human-written content as fast as it was in that era. There's a lot more activity now, but based purely on an eye-count, it's over-run by bots (partly because the best moderation tools are gone!) and the human contributions are declining.
I think this is the same myopia that all successful companies get. They begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product, their users and how it's used.
It's a drift away from users. And a drift towards internal politics. A lot like Rasmussen's drift towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-dri...
As startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product.
These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company. Eventually leading to the cultivation of institutional arrogance.
Externally, you can watch signs of this process unfolding. Companies start engaging in the startup / corporate equivalent of ignoring gravity. Which they can! For a while.
When you're high, you have a ton of air time. You can't tell / feel the pull of gravity in free-fall. And it takes, a very long time, but just like there ain't no such thing as free lunch; there ain't no such thing as "too big to care." It's merely, too big to care for now.
The bill always comes due.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
(Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)