I'm not gonna lie, that ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md is not going to work.
There are a lot of subjective, ambigous instructions that really won't affect what Claude writes. Remember it's not a human, it's not performing careful reasoning over each individual LOC.
As of today, you cannot squeeze a true rule system out of a single file given as context. Many of us have done this mistake at some point – believing that you can specify arbitrarily many rules and that they'll be honored.
If you really care about every such rule, you'd have to create sub-agents, one per rule, and make the agents a required part of a deterministic (non-AI orchestrated) pipeline. Then costs would explode of course.
You can slash the costs by using cheap LLMs once your workflow is stable (but pricey to run!). Fine-tuning, prompt optimization, special distillation techniques, this is a well covered area.
In my experience as an early adopter of both Cursor and CC, nothing. I don't have a CLAUDE.md.
My expectations have shifted from "magic black box" to "fancy autocomplete". i.e. CC is for me an autocomplete for specific intents, in small steps, prompted in specific terms. I do the thinking.
There are a lot of subjective, ambigous instructions that really won't affect what Claude writes. Remember it's not a human, it's not performing careful reasoning over each individual LOC.
Context rot is a thing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564248 ).
As of today, you cannot squeeze a true rule system out of a single file given as context. Many of us have done this mistake at some point – believing that you can specify arbitrarily many rules and that they'll be honored.
If you really care about every such rule, you'd have to create sub-agents, one per rule, and make the agents a required part of a deterministic (non-AI orchestrated) pipeline. Then costs would explode of course.