Boris Cherny closed the AGENTS.md request as "completed" without implementing it

Issue 6235 on anthropics/claude-code asks Claude Code to read AGENTS.md, the config file that Codex, Amp, Cursor and most other harnesses already load, rather than only CLAUDE.md. It has been open since August 2025. It has accumulated over 5,200 reactions and 300+ comments, making it the largest unmet feature request in the repo by roughly 4x. Anthropic's stated position has been "not planned for now" since around May.

Claude Code lead Boris Cherny closed it as "completed." No implementation shipped. Hacker News took it to 293 points and 186 comments. (GitHub)

The top-voted comment: "Making your tool less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem at large not only makes it harder to move to your tool, but also harder to move away."

I want to be fair about the counterargument, because it's real and it's in the thread. ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md solves this. So does an @AGENTS.md include line. It is genuinely a one-liner, and there's a reasonable position that a vendor shouldn't ship first-class support for a competitor-authored spec when a symlink exists.

Except the one-liner is exactly what makes the refusal read as deliberate rather than technical. If the fix is one line, the cost of shipping it is one line. Declining to ship one line, for a year, against 5,200 reactions, is a choice about ecosystem posture, and closing it as "completed" is the part that turned a policy disagreement into a trust story. "Completed" means something. It means the thing people asked for exists now. It doesn't.

I keep a symlink in every repo and it works fine. That's not the point. The point is that config portability is the current fault line in agent tooling, and it's the same fault line running under the skills-format fight (Cursor shipped its own .cursor-plugin/plugin.json manifest this week, head-to-head with the agent-skills format most other repos target), under the session-format fight, under all of it. Every vendor's incentive is to make your accumulated configuration slightly non-portable. Every user's incentive is the opposite.

Practical advice: write your agent config as AGENTS.md, symlink CLAUDE.md to it, and keep the actual content vendor-neutral. Don't put /-command syntax or vendor-specific tool names in the shared file. Put them in a small vendor-specific file that includes the shared one. When you switch harnesses, and you will, the switching cost should be one file, not your whole accumulated house style.

And watch what Cherny does next. He responded on 2026-08-17 to a different long-running issue, #77136, the one about Opus writing unpleasant prose, which had been open since July with 320 reactions. He said he couldn't reproduce it, classified it as model-behavior feedback rather than a Claude Code bug, and routed it to model tuning with custom output styles as the workaround. (GitHub) Two very old, very high-signal issues resolved in the same week, both without shipping what was asked. That's a pattern in triage philosophy, not a coincidence.