I used to use a symlink but was concerned that Claude might see the presence of an "AGENTS.md" file (in e.g, a "List Files" tool call output or from a direct `ls`), be curious and attempt to read it directly (not knowing that it's the same as the "CLAUDE.md" file auto-injected by the harness), and essentially double the token impact / context bloat. Indeed, I did some local experimentation and noticed this was the case, which is why I switched to the explicit "@AGENTS.md" approach.

So perhaps there's no need to be rude about it :)

One bonus to this approach is that I can add Claude Code-specific stuff in there, that I wouldn't need for other harnesses.

Symlinks aren’t portable.

Symlinks are a pain if you're on Windows, I'd rather not bother with them.

I'm pretty sure some agent harnesses read both files when present, so this @ "aliasing" is more token efficient.