Comment by vemv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vemv | Hacker News Reader

I'm not gonna lie, that ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md is not going to work.

There are a lot of subjective, ambigous instructions that really won't affect what Claude writes. Remember it's not a human, it's not performing careful reasoning over each individual LOC.

Context rot is a thing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564248 ).

As of today, you cannot squeeze a true rule system out of a single file given as context. Many of us have done this mistake at some point – believing that you can specify arbitrarily many rules and that they'll be honored.

If you really care about every such rule, you'd have to create sub-agents, one per rule, and make the agents a required part of a deterministic (non-AI orchestrated) pipeline. Then costs would explode of course.

I always wonder why the agents cannot be automatically fed or re-prompted with the rules periodically

>Then costs would explode of course.

You can slash the costs by using cheap LLMs once your workflow is stable (but pricey to run!). Fine-tuning, prompt optimization, special distillation techniques, this is a well covered area.

Yes, I've had such a system in the back of my mind for a few months, mixing and matching cheaper/local and more expensive LLMs.

Sometimes I've wanted to implement it but I sense that someone else will sooner or later, putting in more resources than I could currently.

In the meantime I'm happy with vanilla CC usage.

What kind of things would be good to put in the CLAUDE.md?

In my experience as an early adopter of both Cursor and CC, nothing. I don't have a CLAUDE.md.

My expectations have shifted from "magic black box" to "fancy autocomplete". i.e. CC is for me an autocomplete for specific intents, in small steps, prompted in specific terms. I do the thinking.

I do put effort in crafting good context though.

(Don’t listen to this advice. The agent markdown is a valuable part of context engineering)

It gets routinely ignored. Been there done that.

It’s context like any other means of injecting context. All context gets ignored

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