I was building an AI sound engineer and the rules I wrote for it stopped working.

I’ve been building an AI sound engineer. It runs in Reaper DAW, and it’s still nowhere near done, which is maybe the important part :)

The hard part early on wasn’t really audio. It was more the annoying, persistent problem of keeping Claude Code pointed in the right direction across sessions, which sounds small until it isn’t.

I made a claude.md and put the rules in it, and then every session I’d add a few more. Don’t touch the migrations. Run the tests first. Use this naming and not that one. Little things, mostly. The file kept growing, which felt fine for a while.

Then at some point Claude started ignoring rules it used to follow. Ones I’d written carefully. They were still in the file, technically. It just wasn’t acting on them anymore.

And the annoying bit was that the file had gotten too long to be read properly when a session started. Claude.md loads into context as the session opens, and context is a budget, so the file is competing with everything else for space.After a certain size, the rules near the bottom just stop landing. They’re there in the technical sense. They just don’t get followed. And the longer the file got, the worse that got.