Your CLAUDE.md Is Lying to Your Agent
An empty CLAUDE.md is honest.
When the file isn't there, your agent does the sensible thing: it looks around. It reads the code. It asks you a question. It admits, in its quiet way, that it doesn't know yet — and so it goes and finds out.
A stale CLAUDE.md does the opposite. It walks into the room with total confidence and tells your agent something that used to be true. And your agent believes it. Why wouldn't it? You wrote it down. You committed it. It's the context file.
That's the part nobody warns you about. We talk about CLAUDE.md like it's free insurance — write it once, and your agent stops doing dumb things. Nobody mentions that the file has a half-life, and that a decayed instruction doesn't fall silent. It keeps talking. It just starts being wrong.
