Claude Code silently ignores AGENTS.md when telemetry is off
Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on
Claude Code 2.1.277 promised to read AGENTS.md in projects without CLAUDE.md, but the loader is gated behind a remote feature flag that never resolves when telemetry is disabled. Testing with a canary word shows that setting DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1 blocks the file entirely, with no warning. A one-line CLAUDE.md with an @AGENTS.md import works around the gate, but the silent failure undermines trust in privacy settings.
A privacy setting should never quietly switch off unrelated local behavior.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- nfRfqX5n
Crazy part is: can’t tell if this intended or a bug
- 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