¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Problem statement: Make Google’s Gemini read CLAUDE.md and/or AGENTS.md. By default, it reads only GEMINI.md.

Update ~/.gemini/settings.json to either:

{
  "contextFileName": "AGENTS.md"
}

or

{
  "contextFileName": "CLAUDE.md"
}

My config:

{
  "contextFileName": "CLAUDE.md",
  "security": {
    "auth": {
      "selectedType": "gemini-api-key"
    }
  },
  "ui": {
    "theme": "Default"
  }
}

Why not use GEMINI.md? Claude Code provides, by far, a superior experience¹. Either way, AGENTS.md is the closest to becoming a standard.

It is unfortunate² that Claude Code does not yet support AGENTS.md. One file to rule them all would have been the best.

Alternatively, we could symlink GEMINI.md to one of the aforementioned files:

ln -s AGENTS.md GEMINI.md

or

ln -s CLAUDE.md GEMINI.md

…but that needs to be repeated in each repository, whereas the settings.json change is global.

Update(2025-11-17): Even better, as per docs:

{
  "contextFileName": [
      "AGENTS.md",
      "CLAUDE.md",
      "GEMINI.md"
  ]
}

contextFileName (string or array of strings):

Corollary: It still pays to RTFM directly, even in the LLM era.

Once you launch gemini with this config, it gets automatically updated to:

{
  "context": {
    "fileName": [
      "AGENTS.md",
      "CLAUDE.md",
      "GEMINI.md"
    ]
  },
}

…which suggests it to be the canonical form³.

We know it works because, upon launching gemini within a repository that contains CLAUDE.md, it displays Using: 1 context file.