A thesis, three weeks later
On April 28th, I published an article on DEV.to that made four claims about a CLAUDE.md file — the one that constrains the coding agent at each session — and ended with this sentence: "the CLAUDE.md is never finished, and that's precisely why it works" (4 incidents, 4 rules: how my CLAUDE.md wrote itself). That was a thesis, not a metaphor. Three weeks passed. The file added four rules without me.
What I mean is that I didn't write them on a day I sat down to write rules. I received them on the days an incident had produced them, and all I had to do was record them before they evaporated in the flow of the project. The difference, on paper, seems thin. In the practice of a solo dev piloting an agent in production, it's doctrinal.
One clarification before the list: this article's title almost said "five rules." live-snapshot-cache.md was committed on April 25th, three days before the pivot article was published. It doesn't count. I'd rather have the honest number than the comfortable rounding.
The audit, measured by git
