> somebody, somewhere, was taking advantage of that to give one set of instructions to Claude, and a different set of instructions to some other provider.
I'm this person, I am actively doing this! I have some instructions which the Claude models need and OpenAI models will do by themselves. If the OpenAI models see the Claude instructions, they will go way overboard in a way I don't want.
Mind, the change does not affect me at all, because when both instructions are present Claude continues to read CLAUDE.md and Codex continues to read AGENTS.md. But if Claude started preferring AGENTS.md, that would be mildly annoying.
Within agents.md, an idea. Feel free to steal if you work on this:
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Seriously, though, this is a great idea. Good communicators know to tailor their discourse to their audience. LLMs are just as sensitive to small variations in prompts, and just as inconsistent between them, as are humans.
I did this at one point with Jinja templates.
I wrote an agent launcher sort of bash script. Pass in the command to start the agent, the script checks if there’s a Jinja file in a special directory matching that name, and builds it to AGENTS.md. Then it launches the agent.
I was trying to use it as a sort of janky RAG. I had a bunch of snippets (one for DB architecture, one for how load balancing works, etc), and my Jinja files were mostly a list of snippets to pull in. Voila, a bunch of agents that share little pieces of info but have a single source of truth.
I never got a ton of value tbh, it was very good at just grepping the snippets.
It's not a bad idea, although at that point it probably shouldn't be a .md file anymore. You'd want to use YAML or something.
Sorry how about this:
Maybe now it can be in a .md again :Dcareful, that might lead to programming. using, you know, a programming language.