You wrote a detailed CLAUDE.md, and Claude Code still gets things wrong — wrong convention, touches files it should not, ignores rules you clearly wrote down. The cause is almost never that the rules are missing. It is that they are buried.
The over-specified file problem
CLAUDE.md loads into Claude's context every single session, and performance degrades as that context fills. When the file grows too long, something counterintuitive happens: Claude starts ignoring parts of it. The important rules get lost in the noise, and the genuinely critical instructions sit too deep to reliably influence output.
A bloated file does not just waste tokens. It actively makes Claude less reliable, because it cannot tell which of your hundred lines is the one that matters.
The trap of good intentions
