How to Create an Environment to Work with Many Coding Agents

In this guide, you will learn how to work seamlessly with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.

Anthropic is interested in putting its branding into your source code. If you are working with Claude Code, you will have a CLAUDE.md file as an entry point, and your agent skills should be under the .claude/skills directory. While the other agents use AGENTS.md and .agents/skills. This is annoying when working in a company with many different AI tools.

Coding Agents

How to make Claude use AGENTS.md

In Claude, you can refer to other local files by using the prefix ‘@’. So, to make Claude Code use AGENTs.md, you just need to refer to it.

// CLAUDE.md
@AGENTS.md

How to make Claude use .agents/* instead of .claude/*

💡 Cursor, Antigravity, Codex and GitHub Copilot already support the .agents directory

To achieve this, you will need to use symlinks. To create one, you just need to run this in your shell.

ln -s ../.agents/skills .claude/skills
ln -s ../.agents/agents .claude/agents
ln -s ../.agents/docs .claude/docs
# and so on

💡 You can commit all your symlinks, because git supports them.

Standardizing on .agents/ is a small change with outsized leverage at the organizational level. Instead of making your project dependand of Claude Code, you could make it ready for all major coding agents.

Is your team using anything like this? Or have you found a better pattern? I'd love to hear you on the comments.