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Your 40-rule CLAUDE.md is making your Claude Code agent worse.

The pattern every dev falls into: agent does something annoying → add a rule. Repeat. 40 rules later, the agent is ignoring half and hallucinating conventions that aren't in the file.

The instinct is "more rules = more control." The data says the opposite.

The most-starred CLAUDE.md on GitHub — tens of thousands of stars, more than most frameworks in the space — contains essentially 4 sentences.

→ No dependencies → No build step → No plugins → Just 4 lines describing how an agent should BEHAVE

The principle: stop telling the agent what NOT to do. Tell it who it IS.

10-min read with before/after code from a real project:

On June 9, 2026, Anthropic pulled its Mythos-class tier — the rung above Opus — down to general API access. The headline most coverage stopped at.

The two strings they attached are the real story:

→ A rerouting classifier that can silently hand your request to a weaker model → A 30-day data retention rule that some enterprises literally can't accept

Fable 5 is the most capable Claude you can call today. It's also the most conditional. Both are true — and the gap between them is where your decision actually lives.

11-min read:

Opus 4.8 shipped 41 days after 4.7 — and the cadence, not the benchmark, is the real story.

The moat isn't the model (models leapfrog every six weeks). It's the workflow layer: the 20 hours a week devs spend inside Claude Code, and the trust that lets them walk away from the keyboard.

Leaderboards are for press releases. Trust is for Tuesdays.

You wrote off Grok too early.

xAI quietly shipped ~15 consequential things in 2026. The three that matter:

Grok 4.3 — 2-million-token context window (largest among Western closed models)

Grok Build — agentic coding CLI, 8 parallel sub-agents, compatible with Anthropic Skills + MCP

Grok Imagine 1.0 — 720p video with native synchronized audio

Default Grok hides almost all of this. The 12 setups in the article are the gap — plus an honest "vice-versa alternative" for each, because no, Grok isn't always the right answer.

17-min read:

That's the Airbnb business model in one line. $91.3B in bookings flowed across the platform. $12.2B kept as revenue. $4.6B fell to free cash — a 38% FCF margin.

Marriott and Hilton own or finance buildings. Airbnb owns a database and a brand. Same industry. Wildly different economics.

Wrote up the full teardown — the take rate, the matching layer, and why the machine didn't work for the first decade: