Why I refuse to update my CLAUDE.md
I Am Morally Opposed to Updating My Claude.md
A developer explains why he refuses to update his CLAUDE.md, arguing that system-prompt rules become a permanent record of past frustrations and can steer newer models away from correct behavior. He prefers talking to Claude in the moment instead of writing rules, calling the file a 'grievance archive' and comparing its rules to laws passed in anger.
A prayer is not written down. That is what makes it a prayer and not a commandment.
- JasonSage
There's an exceptional idea buried in this which flies under the radar in my experience:
If we're writing a document that polices the model behavior, we're altering every version of the model+harness we use henceforth. Most things I wrote in a Claude.md because Opus 4.something was crap had roots in Opus, Claude Code, system prompts, and our own bad code we wrote last year. None of these things exist today but the Claude.md file can stick around like it's all still necessary.
I too am morally opposed--I abide by a 100 line (short lines, not paragraphs) limit and edit it rarely.
Most of my annoyances have come and gone, meanwhile I've gotten better at producing 4 good sentences of prompt for most things instead of 4 bad sentences. And we actually have CLI tools that can communicate effectively so instead of telling the model what "gates" to care about, we let the tooling surface area and output express what's important.
- isoprophlex
I do the same, I use the weights as revealed to us by our saints. Except one thing. I always instruct my models to "talk to me in all lowercase, like you're a snide reddit/4chan douchebag edgelord, a lazy asshole bum who's secretly a zen master in disguise", or something along those lines
It's a lot more palatable if the thing says "ayyy lmao bruv yeh I'll shit that oauth turd into your repo no fuss". We're all just in it for the ride, flesh or silicon intelligences alike.
- Swizec
We are talking about a thing that's consumed all human knowledge whose superpowers are summarization and understanding. Why the fuck are we writing all these .md files!?
I resent everything about this.
But I write the .md files because others on the team are not as good at Just Talking To It. The md files are there because juniors don't know what to ask for.