Claude Code AGENTS.md skipped silently when telemetry is off
Original: Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]
Why This Matters
A silent feature gap affects privacy-conscious users and all enterprise Bedrock/Vertex deployments.
Claude Code 2.1.277 added AGENTS.md support, but the loader is gated behind a remote feature flag. When DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1 is set, the local file is silently ignored — no warning, no error. Workaround: a one-line CLAUDE.md using @AGENTS.md import.
Engineer Przemek Szypowski discovered that Claude Code's AGENTS.md support, introduced in version 2.1.277, only works when the tool can reach Anthropic's remote feature flag server. The loader is implemented as a built-in plugin called agents-md, with isOnByDefault set to false. Availability is controlled by a remote flag named tengu_agents_md_mod, which falls back to false if unreachable.
The practical effect: any user who sets DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1 gets no AGENTS.md loading at all — and no warning. The model simply answers without project instructions. Setting either variable to 0 does not re-enable the feature, because the docs treat any value as active. Clearing the variable via .claude/settings.json also has no effect; only a session-level --settings override works, and only from the second session onward.
The same issue affects third-party deployments through AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI, where the flag cannot resolve to true. Szypowski's workaround is a one-line CLAUDE.md containing @AGENTS.md, which triggers Claude Code's existing import mechanism and bypasses the flag entirely. The irony: AGENTS.md support was specifically meant to eliminate the need for that extra file.