Comment by boorang

I ran into this issue about 6 months ago when i was using mitmproxy to view the system prompts for claude code to try to diagnose degraded adherence to my CLAUDE.MD instructions: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18560

To summarize- they were embedding the CLAUDE.MD in a system-reminder with this disclaimer at the end: "IMPORTANT: this context may or may not be relevant to your tasks. You should not respond to this context unless it is highly relevant to your task."

This flew under the radar and they never addressed it, but it felt like at least a big part of the "nerfing" story. I no longer have a Claude Code subscription to test it, but I think it's a useful exercise for most people to sniff the traffic at least once to get an idea of what the back and forth with the Claude Code harness entails.

As others have noted, Anthropic seems to be on a path to make coding ever more accessible to non-coders, and in doing so has removed alot of the controls from devs who do want a more guided experience.