Anthropic has added support for agents.md, and here’s what that means for you…
First off, agents.md is a generic instructions file read by just about every other AI coding tool out there other than Claude.
In your project, you can put in an agents.md and give any AI reading it a nice overview, key instructions, rules you want it to follow, and pretty much anything else you don’t want to repeat at the beginning of every conversation that you start.
Claude insisted on using Claude.md, which was not a big issue if you only use Claude. But if you used other AI tools, you had to use one of several methods to get your information synced between the two instruction files. These could be things like using a sim link or putting a note in one file to read a different file. It was nothing crazy, but just another thing for you to worry about.
Now Claude will check for the agents.md if there is no claude.md. So to come back to what this means for you, effectively, not very much!
If you’re one of the people who has both, and if you want, you can migrate everything over to the agents.md and archive your claude.md. This will kind of give you one place to maintain all of your instructions, and more importantly, if you pull down a repo from somebody else’s project that has an agents.md, you no longer have to go through and connect that to a claude.md file. It’ll pick it up natively. In the end, it’s not going to hurt anything to continue to maintain both if you like it.
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