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Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on

Source: blog.szypowi.cz
Author: pszypowicz
Date: Published Sep 23, 2026

From the Daily Brief

Claude Code 2.1.277 added a fallback that reads a project's AGENTS.md when no CLAUDE.md exists. New testing published on blog.szypowi.cz shows that fallback has a condition nobody announced. Loading AGENTS.md is gated behind a remote feature flag, and when a user disables telemetry or nonessential traffic, the flag never arrives and the file is skipped. Claude Code gives no warning when this happens, so a team can believe its shared agent instructions are active when they are not. The author's fix is small: add a one-line CLAUDE.md that imports the file with @AGENTS.md. The import path does not depend on the flag, so the instructions load regardless of telemetry settings. Teams that standardized on AGENTS.md across several coding agents, and especially those with privacy settings locked down, should add the import rather than rely on the fallback.

Read the 2026-09-24 Brief →

Context

A September 23 report describes a version-specific reason Anthropic's Claude Code could miss project instructions: in the author's tests, turning off telemetry also left its AGENTS.md loader unavailable. The loader sits behind a remotely controlled feature flag in version 2.1.280, after AGENTS.md support was announced in 2.1.277, and when the flag cannot be fetched the file is never read. The skip is silent, so an apparent failure to follow instructions happens before the model sees them. The author reports that a one-line CLAUDE.md containing the import @AGENTS.md restored loading, because that import does not depend on the flag. The report includes the test procedure and workaround; its findings concern the tested versions.

Read the source blog.szypowi.cz