Hacker News front pageSep 23, 2026, 20:15 UTC+8

Claude Code's AGENTS.md support is gated behind a remote flag and silently fails when telemetry is off

Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on

Claude Code 2.1.277 announced AGENTS.md support, but the loader is controlled by a remote feature flag (tengu_agents_md_mod) that defaults to false. The author found that setting DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1 silently prevents the local AGENTS.md from being read, with no warning. Setting the variables to 0 doesn't help, and project-level settings.json can't override it. The only workaround is a one-line CLAUDE.md containing @AGENTS.md. The author argues that reading a local file should never depend on telemetry, and at minimum a skipped file should trigger a visible message.

Why it matters: This is a product behavior exposé backed by concrete code evidence, not a rant. The author traced the silent skip to the remote flag tengu_agents_md_mod and confirmed AGENTS.md is ignored when telemetry is off. HKR all hit, but the blast radius is limited to Claude Code users ...

Read the original ↗Export Markdown

Take

This post is worth reading because the author did the legwork most of us wouldn't: they traced the AGENTS.md loader in Claude Code 2.1.277 to a remote feature flag called tengu_agents_md_mod, which defaults to false. If you set DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1, the local AGENTS.md file is silently skipped — no warning, no fallback. Setting those variables to 0 doesn't help, and project-level settings.json can't override it. The only workaround is a one-line CLAUDE.md containing @AGENTS.md.

The real sting here isn't the missing feature, it's the silence. You turn off telemetry thinking you're just opting out of diagnostics, and suddenly a local-file-reading feature disappears with zero indication. The model won't tell you it skipped your instructions. This hits teams on Bedrock, Vertex, or enterprise gateways especially hard, since they often disable nonessential traffic by policy.

If Anthropic needs a staged rollout, the fallback when the flag can't resolve should at minimum print a visible message saying the file was skipped. The post doesn't mention any official response yet — I'd keep an eye on that GitHub issue.

Source: Hacker News front page · blog.szypowi.cz
Published: Sep 23, 2026, 20:15 UTC+8 · 7 days ago