Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on
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Claude Code 2.1.277 added AGENTS.md support, but the loader sits behind a remote feature flag. With telemetry or nonessential traffic turned off, a local AGENTS.md is skipped without a warning. This is what I measured and the one-line CLAUDE.md I use instead.
Claude Code 2.1.277 announced support for AGENTS.md . In a project with no CLAUDE.md , it is supposed to read AGENTS.md instead. I keep telemetry off in my shell, and in my repos the file never loaded. Issue #95690 explains why, and I added my own measurements to it. This post collects them in one place.
The loader ships as a built-in plugin called agents-md . Its registration in the 2.1.280 bundle looks like this:
W is the plugin’s isOnByDefault value and it is false . B is isAvailable , and it asks a remote feature flag called tengu_agents_md_mod , with false as the fallback. When Claude Code cannot fetch the flag, the plugin is unavailable, and the local file is never read. Reading a markdown file from the working directory needs no network at all, but here it waits on a server-side switch.
I made an empty directory that holds only an AGENTS.md with a canary word in it, and asked claude -p for the word. Each setup ran in two sessions, because the first session in a new configuration only fetches the flag and the second one uses it.
None of these cases print a warning. The session starts, the model answers without the project instructions, and nothing tells you that a file was skipped. The issue also points out that third-party gateways, Bedrock and Vertex have the same problem, because the flag cannot resolve to true there either.