Support for AGENTS.md and .agents/skills/, the community has been asking since August 2025

Support for AGENTS.md and .agents/skills/, the community has been asking since August 2025

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature has been requested multiple times with zero official response
• [x] This is a single feature request

Problem Statement

This has been raised repeatedly by the community for over 7 months with no acknowledgment from the Anthropic team:

• #5659, Configurable Agent Definition File Path (Aug 2025, closed by bot)
• #6235, Support AGENTS.md (Aug 2025, 3,020 upvotes, 224 comments, still open, zero team response)
• #14474, Will Claude Code support AGENTS.md in the future? (Dec 2025, auto-closed as duplicate)
• #20820, Reserve skills/ for user-managed skills (Jan 2026, auto-closed for inactivity)
• #22022, Claude Code ignores AGENTS.md rules (Jan 2026, auto-closed as duplicate)
• #25882, Auto-load ~/.claude/AGENTS.md (Feb 2026, marked stale)

Not a single one has received a response from anyone at Anthropic. The main issue (#6235) has over three thousand upvotes and two hundred comments from the community, and the only responses are from a bot closing duplicates. 7 months. 3,020 upvotes. Zero acknowledgment.

As paying customers (Claude Pro/Max subscribers), this is frankly unacceptable. We're not asking for something obscure or unreasonable. We're asking Claude Code to support the standards that the rest of the industry has already adopted. The fact that this keeps getting raised and keeps getting ignored, while bots auto-close the duplicate issues without anyone even reading them, is deeply frustrating and disrespectful to the community.

The Irony

Anthropic created Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard designed to prevent vendor lock-in for tool integrations. Anthropic also created the Agent Skills open standard (agentskills.io), and the spec itself defines .agents/skills/ as the standard directory for skills. Your own docs state:

"Claude Code skills follow the Agent Skills open standard, which works across multiple AI tools."

Yet Claude Code itself doesn't follow the standard it created. It forces users into .claude/skills/ instead of .agents/skills/. It requires CLAUDE.md instead of supporting the industry-standard AGENTS.md.

You created these open standards for the industry to adopt. The industry adopted them. And now Claude Code is the only major tool not following them.

This is not just ironic, it's self-serving. It locks users into your ecosystem. It's the exact kind of vendor lock-in that MCP was designed to eliminate. How can Anthropic champion open standards with one hand and ignore them with the other?

AGENTS.md, the industry standard

AGENTS.md is used by over 60,000 open-source projects on GitHub. It was created collaboratively by OpenAI, Google, Cursor, Amp, and Factory, and is now stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation.

Tools that support AGENTS.md:

• OpenAI Codex (CLI, IDE extension, and app)
• GitHub Copilot
• Google Jules
• Cursor
• Windsurf
• Amp
• Kilo Code
• OpenClaw
• And many more

Claude Code is conspicuously absent from this list.

.agents/skills/, the standard Anthropic itself created

The .agents/skills/ directory is the convention defined by the Agent Skills open standard, which Anthropic created and maintains. Yet Claude Code uses .claude/skills/ instead.

Tools that support .agents/skills/:

• OpenAI Codex CLI (uses .agents/skills/ by default)
• Gemini CLI
• Cursor
• Kiro CLI / Kiro IDE
• OpenCode (loads from ~/.agents/skills/*/SKILL.md)
• Antigravity
• OpenClaw
• Vercel's Agent Skills ecosystem (skills.sh, add-skill CLI)
• Vercel AI SDK (installs skills to .agents/skills/ for cross-agent compatibility)

Issue #20820 already documented that the workaround of symlinking .claude/skills/ to .agents/skills/ doesn't even work because Claude Code pollutes it with .system/ internal files. So users can't even hack their way around this limitation.

What We're Asking For

1. Read AGENTS.md in addition to CLAUDE.md (not instead of, backwards compatibility matters). Discovery order: CLAUDE.md > AGENTS.md, or both if present.

1. Read .agents/skills/ in addition to .claude/skills/. This is the convention defined by the Agent Skills standard that Anthropic itself created. Skills installed via the Vercel add-skill CLI, OpenCode, Codex, and others all go to .agents/skills/. Claude Code should be able to find them there.

Why This Matters

Developers don't use just one tool. We switch between Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, and others depending on the task. The reality is that most of us use multiple agents daily.

Maintaining duplicate files (CLAUDE.md + AGENTS.md, .claude/skills/ + .agents/skills/) is:

• Error-prone (they drift apart immediately)
• A terrible developer experience
• Completely unnecessary
• And honestly, insulting to users who have been asking for this for over half a year

Anthropic built MCP because you understood that open standards benefit everyone, including Anthropic. You built Agent Skills for the same reason. Apply that same principle here.

Priority

High. This affects every developer who uses Claude Code alongside any other coding agent. That's not a niche use case anymore, that's the majority of your user base.

Every related issue, and the silence

| Issue | Title | Date | Status | Team Response |
|-------|-------|------|--------|---------------|
| #5659 | Configurable Agent Definition File Path | Aug 2025 | Closed by bot | None |
| #6235 | Support AGENTS.md | Aug 2025 | Open, 3,020 👍, 224 comments | None |
| #14474 | Will Claude Code support AGENTS.md? | Dec 2025 | Auto-closed as duplicate | None |
| #20820 | Reserve skills/ for user-managed skills | Jan 2026 | Auto-closed for inactivity | None |
| #22022 | Claude Code ignores AGENTS.md rules | Jan 2026 | Auto-closed as duplicate | None |
| #25882 | Auto-load ~/.claude/AGENTS.md | Feb 2026 | Marked stale | None |

Six issues. Seven months. Over three thousand community upvotes. Two hundred and twenty four comments. Zero responses from anyone at Anthropic.

What We Need From the Team

Acknowledge this request. That's all we're asking for as a starting point. After 7 months and 6 issues, the silence is deafening. It feels dismissive toward a community that actively supports and pays for your product.

If there's a reason you won't do this, tell us. If it's on the roadmap, tell us. If you need help implementing it, the community will submit PRs tomorrow. Many of us already have workarounds with symlinks and wrapper scripts that prove how simple the core change would be.

But the silence? The silence tells us you either don't care or you're deliberately choosing lock-in over interoperability. Neither is a good look for the company that created MCP and Agent Skills.

We love Claude Code. We pay for Claude Code. We just want it to follow the standards it created.