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.
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.
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.
The issue is the higest voted issue on their gitlab repo: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235