Why does CLAUDE.MD keep growing?

If you maintain a CLAUDE.md or an AGENTS.md, this one is worth your time.

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This work traces why these files grow without bound. Appending an instruction is free. Deleting one after its rationale is gone costs exponential verification, so nobody removes anything.

Across 247,694 instruction lifetimes in 1,867 repositories, prompts more than tripled over their lifetime and gained 4.9 net instructions per commit. The older an instruction gets, the less likely anyone is to delete it.

The proposed fix is comments. Writing down the reasoning behind an instruction removed 99.3% of excess instructions in verifiable settings and improved real agentic instruction-following by up to 23.1%.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11095

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