Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke publicly stated that he is considering disabling Claude Code internally at Shopify if it continues to refuse to read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills.

Tobi pointed out that the engineering team may use different Coding Agents such as Codex, Cursor, and Claude Code simultaneously, and more tools are beginning to read a unified AGENTS.md, allowing the team to consolidate project specifications, testing methods, development agreements, and Agent instructions in one place.

However, Claude Code currently relies mainly on its own CLAUDE.md and .claude/skills, leading to different Agents in the same code repository potentially reading two completely different sets of rules, resulting in a "split brain" scenario.

This issue has limited impact on individual developers maintaining multiple sets of files, but for companies like Shopify, where many engineers use AI Coding tools simultaneously, it means needing to synchronize two sets of Agent Contexts long-term; if they become unsynchronized, Agent behavior may deviate.

On the surface, this is a dispute over Markdown files, but behind it lies the question of whether project configurations, Skills, and Contexts should belong exclusively to a particular model company or become a public standard readable by all Agents after Coding Agents enter enterprises.

Shopify has begun to provide answers through its corporate purchasing power: no matter how strong the Claude Code model is, companies are unwilling to maintain parallel engineering specifications for a single tool long-term.

From a market mechanism perspective, corporate purchasing power pressures tool compatibility, shifting funds from proprietary configuration tools to Agents that support unified standards, and event-driven statements elevate discussions on cross-tool standards, benefiting competitors that adopt open configurations while pressuring vendors that insist on proprietary formats.

Source: Public Information