how does agents.md work for subagents and swarms? is it actually that useful?
A bad one is noticeably harmful.
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how does agents.md work for subagents and swarms? is it actually that useful?
A bad one is noticeably harmful.
The obvious reason is that they would prefer to have CLAUDE.md files in every repo (even if it's just a symlink to AGENTS.md). It serves as a free advertisement for them. Same reason as for auto-adding attribution text in commit messages, etc. It's the "Sent from my iPhone" of our time.
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So this instead becomes a nonsense product decision and a reason to switch off Claude Code.
I copy a .claude/CLAUDE.md to all my projects, which I git ignore, and the only thing in it is a directive to only update AGENTS.md.
The obvious reason is that they would prefer to have CLAUDE.md files in every repo (even if it's just a symlink to AGENTS.md). It serves as a free advertisement for them. Same reason as for auto-adding attribution text in commit messages, etc. It's the "Sent from my iPhone" of our time.
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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.
All successful startups begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product. 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...
My theory is that 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 time, 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.
choose not to support them in return if it is a real problem 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).
The obvious reason is that they would prefer to have CLAUDE.md files in every repo (even if it's just a symlink to AGENTS.md). It serves as a free advertisement for them. Same reason as for auto-adding attribution text in commit messages, etc. It's the "Sent from my iPhone" of our time.
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.
My Claude.md has one line that says to read agents.md, this is a bit of a nothingburger
At the current price for SSDs even a pointless symlink becomes waste...
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.