Claude Code Won't Read AGENTS.md, and That's a Problem

Someone filed a feature request asking Claude Code to support AGENTS.md, the emerging standard file format that AI coding agents read to understand a project. Right now Claude Code uses its own CLAUDE.md file. That works if everyone on your team uses Claude. But that's increasingly not how developers work.

Over 60,000 open-source projects use AGENTS.md. Tools like OpenAI's Codex, Google's Jules, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot all read from it. So do roughly two dozen others. The format is simple. It sits alongside your README.md and holds build steps, test commands, and coding conventions that agents need but humans don't want cluttering their docs. The spec came out of direct collaboration between competitors including OpenAI, Google, and Cursor, who decided a shared format beats everyone inventing their own.

Claude Code sticking with CLAUDE.md is an annoying choice. It forces teams to maintain two separate instruction files if they use more than one AI tool, which is becoming common as developers swap between agents depending on the task.

The GitHub issue (#6235), opened by user DylanLIiii on August 21, is tagged as a core enhancement but has no assignee yet. Anthropic tends to move fast on community feedback, so this will probably get addressed. But right now, if your project uses AGENTS.md and you fire up Claude Code, you're on your own.