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:
The most-bookmarked resource in AI coding isn’t a framework or a plugin — it’s four sentences in a markdown file. Here’s why they…
