Claude Code users report silent AGENTS.md skips when traffic is disabled
A blog author says Claude Code’s project-instruction loader depends on a remote feature flag, and reports that a CLAUDE.md import worked around the issue in testing.
A blog post linked on Hacker News reports that Claude Code may skip a project’s AGENTS.md file without warning when telemetry or nonessential traffic is disabled. The author says the behaviour stems from a remote feature flag required by the loader.
Claude Code 2.1.277 added AGENTS.md support, according to the post. The author inspected the 2.1.280 bundle and found the loader asks for a flag that defaults to false. If Claude Code cannot retrieve it, the plugin is unavailable and the local file is not read.
To test the effect, the author placed a canary word in AGENTS.md and asked Claude Code to return it. Across the configurations tested, the word was absent when the file was skipped, and no warning appeared. The author says each configuration was run in two sessions because the first fetched the flag and the second used it.
The post also identifies third-party gateways and Bedrock and Vertex setups as potentially affected when the flag cannot resolve to true. The author’s tests and bundle inspection are the basis for these findings; the source package contains no independent verification or Anthropic response.
As a workaround, the author added a one-line @path import in CLAUDE.md. In a test with nonessential traffic disabled, that import loaded the same content. The author says the approach requires an extra file in each repository.
