[Do Agents Also Need Separate Apple MD and Android MD? Claude Insists on Doing Its Own Thing] Beating AI News: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke is considering banning Claude Code within the company. It’s not that Claude isn’t useful, but it insists on using its own `CLAUDE.md`. Shopify uses multiple agents like Claude Code and Codex simultaneously. Other tools can share a common `AGENTS.md`, but Claude Code only reads `CLAUDE.md`. These two files also recursively layer within large code repositories. If one layer fails to sync, someone ends up with incorrect rules. Shopify has already written automated checks to catch these issues, but Tobi thinks this is completely unnecessary. His request is actually quite simple: Claude Code should also read `AGENTS.md`, so everyone only needs to maintain one file. Thariq, a member of the Claude Code team, responded by saying they would make `AGENTS.md` easier to use. But then he pivoted to explaining why Claude needs its own prompts, skills, and `CLAUDE.md`: the models are different, and specialized optimization yields better results. As a short-term solution, they suggested referencing `AGENTS.md` within `CLAUDE.md`. However, this doesn’t address Tobi’s core issue. You can continue optimizing Claude specifically, but why does the project need a separate entry point for Claude’s rules? Grok reviewed the previously leaked Claude Code source code and came to a more straightforward conclusion: the filename `CLAUDE.md` is hardcoded into the loading logic. If you directly replace it with `AGENTS.md`, the original recursive discovery, loading, and referencing mechanisms would still work without requiring any major architectural changes. So, it’s not that Anthropic can’t unify the system; they just don’t want to make `AGENTS.md` the default standard for Claude Code yet. The comments section largely sides with Tobi. DHH said the distinction is completely unnecessary, Jesse Pollak called it annoying, and Chamath Palihapitiya believes continuing with two systems will inevitably lead to “mental fragmentation.” Kun Chen suggested the correct approach should be to default to reading `AGENTS.md`, and only use `CLAUDE.md` as an optional override for specific Claude optimizations, rather than the other way around. It’s like Apple and Android: it’s not that they can’t be compatible, but they insist on keeping their own separate systems. [Original Article Link]