Hi Everyone, I’m sharing the last piece of the analysis series about the coding agent content quality, config correctness and other interesting (debatable) datapoints. TL;DR: About 1 in 5 CLAUDE.md files in the 10k most starred repos (998 of 5,464) is just a pointer to AGENTS.md. Only 39 AGENTS.md files point back. Skills already hold more of the instructions (42%) than all the main files together (31%). Almost 1,000 SKILL.md files are straight copies of one in another repo. The agent makers’ own repos aren’t cleaner. OpenAI’s median repo leaves almost half its instructions without a file, command or tool to act on, against 31 in 100 for the rest of the field. The config correctness part is worth a look in your own repo. If your CLAUDE.md is one of those pointers, how it points matters (per the Claude Code memory docs): @AGENTS.md as plain text on its own line is an import, so AGENTS.md loads at startup. “See AGENTS.md” in a sentence loads nothing. When a CLAUDE.md exists, Claude Code only reads the CLAUDE.md files, so AGENTS.md shows up only if the agent decides to open it. The same import wrapped in backticks isn’t an import either. The parser skips code spans. On 2.1.277+ you can drop the pointer file entirely. With no CLAUDE.md around, Claude Code reads AGENTS.md directly. Full disclosure: I work on instruction diagnostics and evals , the numbers come from the tool that I’m using for running the diagnostics . The write-up with all the charts is in the first comment. submitted by /u/cleverhoods
Originally posted by u/cleverhoods on r/ClaudeCode
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