Claude Code closes its year-old, 6,145-upvote AGENTS.md feature request as completed: the last big holdout joins the open coding-agent standard

Claude Code closes its most-reacted request ever: the AGENTS.md answer is an import, not native support

Claude Code has closed the most-reacted feature request in its repository's history, a year-old plea to support the open AGENTS.md coding-agent standard. Issue #6235 drew more than 6,100 reactions and more than 360 comments before Anthropic's repo team closed it as completed at 03:37 UTC on August 17, four days short of its first birthday 1. A search of the repository's issues returns no other with more reactions 2. Across the 361 days the request stayed open, that averages more than 17 reactions a day, and about 77 percent of them were plain upvotes 1.

The closing answer is not the native read developers asked for. The official response, posted one second before the closure, tells them to keep CLAUDE.md in the repository: import the shared file or symlink the two names, and Claude Code loads it when a session starts 3. That response has drawn roughly 80 downvotes against a single upvote, and a reply on the same thread compressed the verdict into eight words: "It's a workaround, not actual adoption of AGENTS.md." 4

The stakes are portability. Teams running several coding agents want one instruction file every tool reads, and Claude Code's official answer to that wish was a wrapper: keep a CLAUDE.md beside AGENTS.md, either importing it or symlinked to it. 3

What AGENTS.md is: a README for machines

AGENTS.md is a single Markdown file at the root of a repository holding what a new contributor needs: build commands, test commands, code style, and the conventions that stop an agent from guessing. The standard's own pitch is "a README for agents" 5. Monorepos can nest one per package, and agents read the nearest file 5. More than 60,000 open-source projects carry one, and the format is now "stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation" 5.

The supported-agents list covers most of the industry 5:

• Codex from OpenAI
• Gemini CLI from Google, and Jules from Google
• Cursor
• the coding agent from GitHub Copilot
• Devin from Cognition, and Windsurf from Cognition
• and 17 more agents on the grid, Amp and Warp among them

Claude Code is the notable absence from that list.

A year of pressure, measured in upvotes

The request opened on August 21, 2025 with a plain argument: Codex, Amp, Cursor, and others were standardizing on AGENTS.md, while CLAUDE.md "feels too specific to Claude Code" 6. The thread filled with team-shaped pain over the following year: groups where most developers use Claude Code but policy allows any tool, unable to agree which file to commit, and symlink stubs drifting out of sync in repos with nested AGENTS.md files 7 8.

The ecosystem did not wait. A third-party Claude Code customization tool, tweakcc, merged a pull request in February titled "AGENTS.md support for Claude Code" that makes Claude Code fall back to AGENTS.md when no CLAUDE.md exists 9. Symlink recipes had already circulated on Hacker News for months 10.

Our read on why this ran a year: a native read would make leaving Claude Code as cheap as staying, while a required shim keeps the vendor's filename in every repository. The incentive points the same way for any vendor. More than six thousand reactions is what it took to get an answer.

What "completed" actually means

Here is the confirmed mechanism, in the repo team's own words: "Claude Code reads `CLAUDE.md`," and to share one file with other agents, "create a `CLAUDE.md` containing just `@AGENTS.md` (an import), or symlink `CLAUDE.md` to `AGENTS.md`" 3. The response ends with a "Generated with Claude Code" attribution and links a memory-docs section on the pattern 3.

The shipped artifacts agree that nothing native changed. Claude Code's memory documentation still leads with CLAUDE.md, presenting CLAUDE.md files and auto memory as the two mechanisms that carry knowledge across sessions 11. The three newest changelog entries, versions 2.1.235 through 2.1.237, contain no AGENTS.md item 12. "Completed" here means a way to share the file got documented, not that the agent now reads the standard.

A side mystery resolves in the timestamps. When the closure reached Hacker News this week, commenters asked whether a random third-party pull request had closed the issue, because tweakcc's February pull request literally says "Closes anthropics/claude-code#6235" 13. It did not: that pull request merged on February 3 9, and the issue stayed open another 195 days before the API recorded an August 17 closure performed by a repo collaborator 1.

The assembled timeline, from sources no single page states in order:

• August 21, 2025: request opened, auto-labeled enhancement, area:core, and memory 1
• February 3, 2026: tweakcc merges third-party AGENTS.md support referencing the issue, which stays open 9
• August 17, 2026, 03:37 UTC: closing response posted, request closed as completed one second later 3
• August 19 to 20, 2026: Hacker News debate runs, and issue comments keep arriving through the morning this story published 13 1

The portability prize, still one shim away

For builders the practical state is honest and a little absurd: write AGENTS.md for the ecosystem, then add a one-line CLAUDE.md that imports it, because Claude Code still wants its own filename at the door 3. The reply that bested the official answer asked why a two-line change to read AGENTS.md automatically was never on the table 4. That question is now the whole story. The signal that the standard truly arrives will be a changelog entry naming AGENTS.md, or a memory page that stops leading with CLAUDE.md. A closed issue is not either of those.