Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke posted on X Tuesday that he may bar Claude Code from the company until Anthropic makes it read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills. Instruction files like these sit throughout a repository and apply recursively down the tree, carrying build commands, testing rules, and coding conventions so an agent isn’t told the same thing every session. Claude Code reads only CLAUDE.md. Across a monorepo worked by thousands of Shopify developers, Lütke wrote, some directory always ends up holding one file and not the other, which leaves a subset of them working “with lobotomy.” Shopify papers over the gap with automation, which he called “a stupid complexity tax.” Anthropic offers workarounds and has closed a request for recursive AGENTS.md support as not planned.
