Comment by hansmayer
2 days ago
Hey Boris from the Claude Code team - could you guys please be so kind so as to stop pushing that narrative about CLAUDE.md, either yourselves or through influencers and GenAI-grifters? The reason being, it is simply not true. A lot of the time the instructions will be ignored. Actually, the term "ignored" is putting the bar too high, because your tool does not intentionally "ignore", not having sentience and knowledge. We experience the effects of the instructions being ignored, because your software is not deterministic, its merely guessing the next token, and sometimes those instructions tacked onto the rest of the context statistically do not match what we as humans expect to see (while its perfectly logical for your machine learning text generator, based on the datasets it was trained on).
This seems pretty aggressive considering this is all just personal anecdote.
I update my CLAUDE.md all the time and notice the effects.
Why all the snark?
Is it really just a personal anecdote ? Please do read some other comments on this post. The snark comes from everyone and their mother recommending "just write CLAUDE.md", when it is clear that this technology does not have intrinsic capability to perform reliable outputs based on human language input.
Yeah… that’s the point of LLMs: variable output. If you’re using them for 100% consistent output, you’re using the wrong tool.
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CLAUDE.md is read on session startup.
If you're continually finding that it's being forgotten, maybe you're not starting fresh sessions often enough.
I should not have to fight tooling, especially the supposedly "intelligent" one. What's the point of it, if we have to always adapt to the tool, instead of the other way around?
It's a tool. The first time you used a shell you had to learn it. The first time you used a text editor you had to learn it.
You can learn how to use it, or you can put it down if you think it doesn't bring you any benefit.
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I understand you're trying to be helpful but the number of "you're holding it wrong" things I read about this tool — any AI tool — just makes me wonder who vibe coders are really doing all this unpaid work for.