Before this week I was sure Anthropic were actually just as soulless as OpenAi, just because they don't support open standards like AGENTS.md and /.agents/skills. They can so easily win the support of the open source crowd if they just support open standards like these.
Big projects should have a lot of nested AGENTS.md files, it's inconvenient and they simply need to add support for the universal standard as everyone else has done rather than being a weird holdout like IE6.
I felt that way too, until I noticed how different their schemes are for discovering these files, e.g. Claude will pick up context files in parent folders, and Codex doesn’t.
Maybe it’s better that they maintain different names to prevent people from assuming that they work the same
Now that would make it easier for Codex users to switch indeed! This seems like the best timing for it they're ever gonna get, and worth the ultra tiny loss of marketing value their "CLAUDE.md" naming provides.
For the Anthropic employees here reading along, pitch it to whoever has kept blocking this, because you need to get the most out of this opportunity here.
Why would they? They were first with CLAUDE.md. Others could have adopted to that if they wanted. Don’t see a reason for Claude to change their approach.
Being a good citizen of the commons means not hard-coding things specific about your product as a standard. ChatGPT or Gemini using a file called "CLAUDE" doesn't make sense. The first mover doesn't just automatically win.
