Posted by sshh12 2 days ago
I researched this the other day, the recommended (by Anthropic) way to do this is to have a CLAUDE.md with a single line in it:
@AGENTS.md
The recommended approach has the advantage of separating information specific to Claude Code, but I think that in the long run, Anthropic will have to adopt the AGENTS.md format
Also, when using separate files, memories will be written to CLAUDE.md, and periodic triaging will be required: deciding what to leave there and what to move to AGENTS.md
Anthropic say "put @AGENTS.md in your CLAUDE.md" file and my own experiments confirmed that this dumps the content into the system prompt in the same way as if you had copied it to CLAUDE.md manually, so I'm happy with that solution - at least until Anthropic give in and support AGENTS.md directly.
Only sane (guaranteed portable) option is for it to be a relative symlink to another file within the same repo, of course. i.e. CLAUDE.md would be -> 'AGENTS.md', not '/home/simonw/projects/pelicans-on-bicycles/AGENTS.md' or whatever.
But I can’t speak to it working across OS.
I thought git by default treats symlinks simply as file copies when cloning new.
Ie git may not be aware of the symlink.
discouraging, actually, considering how frequently Claude ignores my AGENTS.md guidance.
At this point these tools are all pretty good. I also feel like folks often also over index on the output style or UI. Like to me the “you’re absolutely right!” sycophancy isn’t a notable bug; it’s a signal that you’re too in-the-loop. Generally my goal is to “shoot and forget”—to delegate, set the context, and let it work. Judging the tool by the final PR and not how it gets there.
You're going to immediately be overwhelmed with code, comments, markdown files, and all manner of extra text that may or may not solve your problem. The chore then becomes PR reviews of tons of iffy code, and if you merge too much of it, after too long your codebase will be a bloated mess that even the craftiest prompts won't untangle.
It's best to use to brainstorm and implement very targeted prompts, set and forget is crazy.
> Instead of a bloated API, an MCP should be a simple, secure gateway that provides a few powerful, high-level tools [...] In this model, MCP’s job isn’t to abstract reality for the agent; its job is to manage the auth, networking, and security boundaries and then get out of the way.
Our auth, log diving, infra state, etc, is all usable via cli, and it feels pretty good when pointing Claude at it.
You can do anything you want via a CLI but MCP still exists as a standard that folks and platforms might want to adopt as a common interface.
It's not that practical to have an MCP that can connect to, for example, ALL of your corporate Google Drive. Not happening.
Why isn't it possible to limit it to a specific whitelisted set?
It is but you need to use an MCP client and servers that implement Roots.
But in general I still don’t really use MCP. Agents are just so good at solving problems themselves. I wish MCP would mostly focus at the auth part instead of the tool part. Getting an agent access to an API with credentials usually gives them enough power to solve problems on their own.
[1]: https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/1984756813850374578?s=46
read the document at https://blog.sshh.io/p/how-i-use-every-claude-code-feature and tell me how to improve my Claude code setup
We are literally having to play mind games with our tooling now to convince and coax it into doing certain things. I swear we are not far off from having to call in sick to work because your LLM "is going through a lot right now and just needs a mental health break".
I just don't wanna deal with any of this.
Em dash and "it's not X, it's Y" in one sentence. Tired of reading posts written by AI. Feels disrespectful to your readers
The people who just copy paste output from ai and ship it as a blog post however, deserve significant condemnation for that.
I use AI for code, but I never use it for any writing that is for human eyes.
> the author clearly read through, organized, and edited the output.
Also worth noting, I've read plenty of human written stuff that has errors in it, so I read everything skeptically anyway.
The iPhone brought us Eternal September 2.
Didn’t realize you were forced to read this?
> Feels disrespectful to your readers
I didn’t feel disrespected—I felt so respected I read the whole thing.
Who gives a shit?
If you can’t stand AI writing and you made it pretty far along before getting upset, who are you mad at, the author or yourself? Would you be happier if you found out this was written without AI and that you were just bad at detecting AI writing?
I've found myself doing similar workarounds. I'm guessing anthropic will just make the /compact command do this instead soon enough.
Fun fact, a large chunk of context is reserved for compaction. When you are shown that you have "0% context remaining," it's actually like 30% remaining that's reserved for compaction.
And yet, for some reason I feel like 50% of the time, compaction fails because it runs out of context or hits (non-rate) API limits.
But I have no idea what state it will be in after compact, so it’s better to ask it to write a complete and thorough report including what source files to read. Lot more work but better than going off the rails.
Are the CLI-based agents better (much better?) than the Cursor app? Why?
I like how easy it is to get Cursor to focus a particular piece of code. I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this ____."
I haven't really tried a CLI agent; sending snippets of code by CLI sounds really annoying. "Fix login.ts lines 148-160, it's broken like this ___"
I've been coding seriously for about 15 years. No single tool has changed how I code more than claude code and I'm including non-"AI" tooling/services. This sounds like I'm shilling but I am not affiliated. It's played a large part in injecting my passion back into building stuff.
Part of it is the snappy more minimal UX but also just pure efficacy seems consistently better. Claude does its best work in CC. I'm sure the same is true of Codex.
There's even an official Anthropic VS Code extension to run CC in VS Code. The biggest advantage is being able to use VS Code's diff views, which I like more than in the terminal. But the VS Code CC extension doesn't support all the latest features of the terminal CC, so I'm usually still in the terminal.
> I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this
This flow works well.
Really, the interface isn't a meaningful part of it. I also like cmd-L, but claude just does better at writing code.
...also, it's nice that Anthropic is just focusing on making cool stuff (like skills), while the folk from cursor are... I dunno. Whatever it is they're doing with cursor 2.0 :shrug:
The agentic part of the equation is improving on both sides all the time.
Whereas I tried Kilo Code and CoPilot and JetBrain's agent and others direct against Sonnet 4 and the output was ... not good ... in comparison.
I have my criticisms of Claude but still find it very impressive.
There is no customer advantage to developing cheap and fast if the delivered product isn't well conceived from a current and future customer-needs perspective, and a quickly shipped product full of bugs isn't going to help anyone.
I think the same goes for AI in general - CEOs are salivating over adopting "AI" (which people like Altman and Amodei are telling them will be human level tomorrow, or yesterday in the case of Amodei), and using it to reduce employee head count, but the technology is nowhere near the human level needed to actually benefit customers. An "AI" (i.e. LLM) customer service agent/chatbot is just going to piss off customers.