Measured: Claude Code silently skips AGENTS.md when telemetry is off
steipete · x · 2026-09-24
Claude Code 2.1.277 announced AGENTS.md support, but a blogger measured that the loader sits behind a remote feature flag tenguagentsmdmod, off by default. With CLAUDECODEDISABLENONESSENTIALTRAFFIC=1 or DISABLETELEMETRY=1 set, a local AGENTS.md is silently skipped without any warning.
The test is clean: an empty directory with only a canary-word AGENTS.md, querying claude -p for the word (file reading disabled), two sessions per config since the first session only fetches the flag.
The irony: reading a local markdown file needs no network at all, yet it waits on a server-side switch. Workaround: just use a one-line CLAUDE.md instead.
Related event: Claude Code Bug Silently Skipped AGENTS.md, Fixed in 2.1.281(2 posts)→
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