It's not a surprise that you don't expect the rules there to be followed even with less than 100 lines of changes. Yet still see folks like Karpathy post rules around with hundreds of stars.
Tell me if you're still spending the effort of trying claude.md, and are they effective, what're you writing in it.
Update: I'm more of talking about behavior rules here (coding standard, comment style, Do this and Don't do that, etc.). For facts like project directories, important doc ref, commands, sure that always helps.
Put your coding guidelines in the ./claude/rules for additional progressive disclosure, not CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md.
For example, if I write a bad AGENTS.md for a repo with 100 engineers actively working in it, then every agent for every engineer gets worse, without anyone really noticing.
I think we should move towards data-based tuning of AGENTS.md, testing out changes, gathering data, and then making a decision on whether or not to ship it.
- Keep it concise, use progressive disclosure / nested AGENTS.md for information expansion - Give agent the high level repo structure if necessary - Have a "why" section to align the agent, high level, what your code is doing - Keep behavior instructions positive where possible, eg Always clarify intent before acting
Anthropic has a new post series on enterprise adoption, their first one is on the setup and AGENTS.md gets a good chunk of that
I now have agents write more of that stuff but deeply review it. As peer commenter points out, a bad instruction can do damage. Keep them lean and clean, adjust them as new models arrive.