Your CLAUDE.md Is Probably Too Long (And That's Why It's Not Working)
· 10 min read
Here's a pattern that plays out constantly in teams adopting AI coding agents: a developer has Claude disobey a rule, so they add a clearer version to their CLAUDE.md. Claude disobeys a different rule, so they add that one too. After a few weeks, the file is 400 lines long and Claude is ignoring more rules than ever. The solution made the problem worse.
This happens because of a fundamental property of instruction files that most developers never internalize: past a certain size, adding more instructions causes the model to follow fewer of them. Getting instruction files right is less about completeness and more about ruthless selection — knowing what to include, what to cut, and how to architect the rest.
