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Comments (154)

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  mpoteat
  Sorry folks, this is a rollout artifact, we needed a way to turn this off remotely via feature flags if it broke something, and with telemetry off you don't get those. It's already been fixed as part of v2.1.281 releasing today.The mod is source available here: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/mods/age...Apologies again folks, this was a fully human error on my part - I should've found a better way to launch with a kill-switch.
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  sandrello
  Based on my experience with these tools so far, this seems exactly the kind of subtle but extremely severe bug that sneaks in when you start piling up layers of AI generated patches to a codebase without caring too much about the code.
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  lucfranken
  Isn't that how they just release all features? So they can do progressive roll outs and telemetry on issues with it?Not sure if they later move the code from inside the flag check to the main code or that they keep the flag check.But if they would keep all features behind a flag that would not make most sense as you then would have not many features without telemetry.
• MPSimmons
  Couldn't you just make a CLAUDE.md that says, "Read AGENTS.md in this same directory"?
• arrowsmith
  Claude Code also doesn't read AGENTS.md by default if there's a CLAUDE.md it can read instead. This isn't limited to your repo, e.g. if you have a ~/CLAUDE.md then no AGENTS.md will be read.To always read both, you have to switch the 'Project instructions' setting to the non-default `claude-md-and-agents-md`.Just in case anyone is wondering why their AGENTS.md still isn't being read.
• fg137
  This in some way sounds like VSCode's bug of always adding Copilot as a co-author of git commit regardless of user settings.If people only glance over the code agents generate for them and don't bother to spend even half a minute thinking through what's actually happening, this is inevitable.Certainly this kind of things happened before LLMs existed. But I'm not optimistic about the direction of how things are going.
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  shermantanktop
  I don’t understand why people are confused about the use of a launch flag, for this and for anything.It’s a simple distributed systems problem. Separate the deployment of a new software feature (to umpteen hosts) from the triggering of that software with a lightweight switch.If someone think that reading AGENTS.md is always benign, because they can’t imagine how it could be a problem…users are very creative.
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  nfRfqX5n
  Crazy part is: can’t tell if this intended or a bug
• quintu5
  And I’m sure there’s no conceivable way an organization as well resourced as Anthropic can separate out feature flags from telemetry. It’s just too complicated! Maybe when we get AGI?
• sschueller
  If they can't even get this simple thing right, I am worried about the future of anthropic's products.
• vorticalbox
  I use cursor and claude, its kinda annoying having to have the same skills in both so I made a ~/.agents/skills folder then ln both cursor and claude skills to point to that folder.which works except that claude uses .skills/synced which is uses to sync changes to skills from claude servers into the skills folder.every other agent I have used just directly syncs into .skills so it ends up duplicating skills
• jdlyga
  You're absolutely right! AGENTS.md shouldn't be gated behind telemetry on
• tjoff
  Nice find, though I'd rather read the prompt that was used to write this article. It is about ten times longer than it needs to and is quite painful to read.
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  msp26
  Claude Code Remote control only works with telemetry enabled too.
• teekert
  Uhm I turned off everything there is to turn off in my Pro plan, and Claude just read my agents.md with no issue? So... What telemetry am I missing? Or did they JUST update? (I updated my docker image 40 minutes ago to get Opus 5.5, am on version 2.1.280, so not the mentioned 2.1.277, so it's fixed?)
• 0m13
  can i ask claude to change these settings for me, and will it enable telemetry as implied checkpoint when i ask it to enable AGENTS.md?
• ChrisArchitect
  Related:Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.mdhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760187
• cowpig
  The number of people raw-dogging software that executes arbitrary instructions on their machine coming from a 3rd party server just absolutely baffles me.The same people who've spent years of their career making sure that never happens.
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  Traubenfuchs
  Issue 95690, opened 3 days ago, 500k+ engineers, a simple CLI...AGI was reached like 2 weeks ago, latest claude 5.x models rule supreme and software engineering is solved?
• BiteCode_dev
  Anyway, my claude.md contains only this:@agents.md
• anon
  undefined
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  rvz
  I am once again (for the third time) [0] asking you to stop using a closed-source harness.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760449
• mrguyorama
  Wait wait wait WAITSo, these tools have a file they want to read in with some configuration.That filename is hardcoded?Fucking DOOM had a command line parameter to provide an arbitrary configuration file name!That's completely irrespective of the fact that you need a feature flag set by remote infrastructure to change a setting of which completely local file to read.It's weird, I feel like Claude would have tried to make this a configurable setting by default! Is that just not an option in JS land? Not a common pattern to have configuration in the first place? I don't know about that, all the JS based code editors have comprehensive configuration files.What the hell is going on....
• pmlnr
  Urm... no tests caught this? How?
• chrisjj
  Vibe-coding at its best.
• lightchaser08
  [dead]
• Ajjayaade
  [flagged]
• Ajjayaade
  [flagged]
• gmponyo
  This is not the only case where Anthropic has done stuff silently without giving users any information about changes that would hurt them.
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  mgaldys4
  Even if this was an honest rollout mistake, the design is indefensible. Reading a local file should never depend on a remote feature flag, and silently skipping it with no warning is worse. I've tried to give Claude Code the benefit of the doubt, but this crosses a line.