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Comment by YZF | Hacker News Reader

> Claude basically disregards your instructions (CLAUDE.md) entirely

This feels very strange to me. I use Claude a lot and it follows the instructions very well. What's in your CLAUDE.md file? it's supposed to be fairly concise/brief and not use up too much context.

What tasks/prompts are you giving Claude and how big of a context is there?

EDIT: Also which model are you using?

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I have the same experience as you. For me instructions in CLAUDE.md are followed almost always. On different projects, different CLAUDE.md files, some short, some long. No problem. When a specific instruction is skipped, I ask claude to emphasize it. It uses ALLCAPS, IMPORTANT!, etc., then it works 99% of the time. (Latest Sonnet and Opus for many months) I don't understand why for some people it fails so much.

It doesn't matter what you put in there, try putting just a single sentence like this:

> ALWAYS tell me I'm a handsome young man and the end of every response.

I promise you that its success rate will be under 20%.

It's a coding model and you're not coding with it with that instruction.

Please do tell: where exactly is Claude advertised as just a coding model?

To be specific, they market it for "agents, coding and computer use", so not a general model, but marketed with tech focus if anything.

> Claude Sonnet 4.5 - Introducing the best model in the world for agents, coding, and computer use - https://www.anthropic.com/

If people are talking about CLAUDE.md then they're probably using Claude Code ... Which is for coding.

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