Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app

I wouldn't even think that CLAUDE.md would make it into source control, let alone into the product. I don't AI-code for a living, so I don't know what is considered best practices, but I would think that CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, REQUIREMETNS.md, MY_PLAN.md, THIS_STUFF.md, THAT_THING.md, all the instruction/feeder files that drive the AI should not go into source control. Only the actual code that gets compiled.

I look at all those files the same way as IDE configuration cruft--it's workstation-specific configuration that shouldn't even go into source control. I would .gitignore all of those files. Is this not what is done in industry?

EDIT: Wow, thanks for all the replies. Very eye-opening to see what's happening outside of my hobby-experimentation with the technology. I was coming at it with the assumption that 1-2 out of 20 people on the team were using CLAUDE.md, so why have it in source control. But if all 20 people are using it, I can see the benefits. This reply chain has really opened my eyes, thank you HN.

> Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple is doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools…They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally.

--Mark Gurman, Bloomberg https://x.com/tbpn/status/2016911797656367199

Unrelated:

Yuck. a lot of those replies have LLM smells. Do people love being a hollow puppet for LLMs to fill in? Have people lost their identity?

People become so lazy after ai. Even they don't check what they commit.

Considering that XCode supports using Claude directly, I'm not surprised to a degree. I'm more surprised it was not blocked out by whatever build tooling they use.

Does anyone have a copy of the files? It would be interesting to see!

Dozens of comments, but not a single "What was in their Claude.md"

to be honest, for some reason I expected most of apple to eschew claude/ai coding.

I'm not sure why. It just doesn't feel very Apple-like

All the AI hate... Of course they use Claude. What do you think? They're idiots? They use computers too...

Cloude Code has cascading rules for md files.

You can include project/team based md files in your repo and exclude env/system md files (eg from you home directory, which includes your personal coding instructions).

So yeah.. nothingburger.

Are we going to keep on brow-beating vibe coders from here?

So much FUD (and bot replies dogpiling on?) in that thread. It's just a file that specifies some structure for the project. Nothing super secret.

I really hope its not churning out massive amounts of code for osx and ios or we are in for some pretty interesting times in the next year or so.

Original link: https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2049986504617820551?s=20

Whilst tempting, I think it is important not to read too much into this.

It is no secret that Apple has an enormous R&D budget.

It is no secret that Apple operates with hundreds of siloed teams in order to maintain individual domain expertise. The teams then come together in a collaborative manner to bring together the final products.

So yes, it is likely true that SOME teams use SOME LLM for SOME tasks. It is a viable argument from R&D and other perspectives. Apple is an enormous multinational company, it is unlikely they have zero-AI on-site.

What is guaranteed NOT to be the case is that Apple is somehow vibecoding company-wide. Old-school engineering is too important for Apple.

I'm sure journalists and Anthropic would love to have you believe otherwise, but I think we need to keep our feet on the ground here and accept the reality is more old-school.

Afterall, as others have pointed out already here ... whilst the rest of Silicon Valley has been shoveling truckloads of cash at AI, Apple have been patiently sitting, watching the bandwagon trundle along the rails.

Is it really a mistake? OpenAI's own agent SDK also has a Claude.md file. That's not an indication that OpenAI internally use Claude, rather, it's there because the SDK has multi-model support.

I don't think you need to even see any files to realize much of Apple's software is vibe-coded by now.

Had some issues with my monitor apparently seeing connection to my Mac Mini, but the Mac Mini displaying black, apparently somehow got out of sync with my monitor, sleeping the display controller then waking it solved it.

Gathered a bunch of data, wanting to submit a report, since I'm a Apple Developer Program member since like two days ago, and I wanna be a good c̶u̶s̶t̶o̶m̶e̶r̶ user, so I opened up Feedback Assistant.

It asks me for my email, I input it, press enter. A password input appears, but keyboard focus doesn't move there automatically. I know is such a tiny nitpick practically, but tiny shit like this makes it so obvious that not a single person actually tried this UX. 10-15 years ago, Apple would never release something that isn't perfect, but now there are these UX edges absolutely everywhere across the OS.

I ended up not logging in at all, wrote my fix into a tiny fix-display.swift file which I'll run when it happens instead.