Every CLAUDE.md I read grows. Nobody shrinks one. That's the symptom. The disease is treating it like documentation when it's actually a system prompt.
The file gets loaded into context on every turn. Every line you add is a line Claude has to read to find the rule that matters. Add enough lines and the rule that matters becomes a needle in your own haystack. Worse, it silently changes meaning. The rule that matters today isn't the rule that mattered when you wrote it down six weeks ago.
The framing shift is small but load bearing. CLAUDE.md is a system prompt. That means tokens are a budget. You have somewhere around 500 instruction lines before signal degrades meaningfully. How do you spend them?
Three buckets
Go through your file line by line. Each line falls into one of three buckets.
