Dynamic Beating AI News: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke is considering disabling Claude Code at the company. It's not that Claude is ineffective, but it insists on using its own CLAUDE.md.

Shopify currently uses multiple Agents such as Claude Code and Codex. While other tools can share AGENTS.md, Claude Code only references CLAUDE.md. These two sets of files are recursively layered in a large code repository. If there is a sync issue at any level, someone ends up with the wrong rules. Shopify has already implemented automated checks as a safeguard, and Tobi believes this is unnecessary trouble.

His request is actually simple: Claude Code should also read AGENTS.md, and one shared file would suffice for maintenance.

Claude Code team member Thariq responded by saying that they will make AGENTS.md easier to use. However, he then went on to explain why Claude needs its own prompt, Skills, and CLAUDE.md: the models are different, and custom optimization yields better results. As a short-term solution, they still reference AGENTS.md within CLAUDE.md.

This does not address Tobi's concern. While you can continue to provide exclusive optimizations for Claude, why must there be a separate Claude-specific entry point for maintaining project rules?

Grok reviewed the leaked Claude Code source code and came to a more direct conclusion: the file name CLAUDE.md is hardcoded in the loading logic. By simply changing it to AGENTS.md, the existing recursive discovery, loading, and referencing mechanism would still work without requiring any major architectural changes.

Therefore, Anthropic is not incapable of unification; it simply does not yet want to make AGENTS.md the default standard for Claude Code.

Most comments in the section side with Tobi. DHH says this distinction is entirely unnecessary, Jesse Pollak finds it annoying, and Chamath Palihapitiya believes continuing with two systems will definitely lead to "brain fissure." Kun Chen suggests the correct approach would be to default to reading AGENTS.md, and if true Claude-specific optimizations are needed, then keep CLAUDE.md optional, rather than the other way around.

This is like Apple and Android: not that they are incompatible, but they each insist on sticking to their own ecosystem.