I am morally opposed to updating my Claude.md

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.

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.

Arainach

This is a weird article. The first half is somewhat interesting but can be summarized entirely by its last paragraph: > I’m fairly sure a meaningful percentage of my system prompt is now actively making things worse—instructions written for a model that no longer exists, aggressively steering a smarter one away from things it would have gotten right on its own. But I can’t tell which lines those are, Then the article says "This is the part where I stop joking." and goes utterly off the deep end, and I am not getting the joke.

groby_b

It's... a weird take. "Sure, the model makes repeatedly the same mistakes, and I could prevent that, but then it wouldn't be the same model" sounds like an excuse for masochism. The one small bit of truth is that yes, instructions might become outdated, and they might affect negatively how the system performs. You fix that by... updating your instructions. And if you deeply care about that potential negative impact (most models are pretty good at just ignoring long outdated issues), you run evals on model upgrades. You certainly don't refuse to use anything but the bare model. (Of course, there are also folks who refuse to write code in any way except with sed, so there we go)

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.