September 24, 2026
Claude Code Stops Silently Skipping Instructions: v2.1.281 Fixes AGENTS.md
As of September 23, Claude Code v2.1.281 fixes AGENTS.md reading when telemetry is disabled and when using Amazon Bedrock. In earlier versions, the agent could fail to load instructions without an error or warning.
Peter Steinberger 🦞
@steipete
Hmm. There is a catch here. https://blog.szypowi.cz/p/claude-code-reads-agents.md-only-when-telemetry-is-on/
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**Previously, the flag controlled everything.** Native AGENTS.md reading arrived in v2.1.277, but DISABLE_TELEMETRY, DO_NOT_TRACK, DISABLE_GROWTHBOOK, and CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC disabled feature flag fetching. Prefee reproduced the issue in v2.1.277: with CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1, the agent skipped AGENTS.md.
There is now a workaround. The native installation can be updated with `claude update`. Until then, a CLAUDE.md file next to AGENTS.md containing the single line `@AGENTS.md` helps: Claude Code will load the instructions through an import.
In v2.1.281, direct AGENTS.md reading works by default only where there is no CLAUDE.md or CLAUDE.local.md in the current directory or any parent directory.
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