Mine grew past 500 lines and Claude started treating everything as equally important. Conventions, architecture decisions, project context — all in one file, all weighted the same. The one convention that mattered for the current task? Buried somewhere in the middle. (Anthropic’s own docs recommend keeping it under 200 lines. Past that, Claude ignores half of it.) What ended up working for me: breaking it into individual files. decisions/DEC-132.md — “Use connection pooling, not direct database calls.” Title, choice, rationale. That’s the whole file. patterns/conventions.md — naming, code style, structure rules. project/context.md — tech stack, what we’re building, current state. Then an index.md that lists all decisions in one place so the agent can scan by domain. Session starts, agent reads the index, pulls only what’s relevant. Three levels — index scan, topic load, cross-check if needed. After a few iterations of this: 179 decisions exposed to every session. Agent reads DEC-132, stops suggesting direct DB calls. Reads conventions, applies snake_case. Haven’t corrected either in months. Honestly the thing that surprised me most — one massive context file is worse than no context at all. The agent gets lost. Splitting by concern and letting it pick what to load — that’s what fixed it. The memory structure I use that explains my 3-level memory retrieval system: https://github.com/Fr-e-d/GAAI-framework/blob/main/docs/architecture/memory-model.md What does your setup look like ? Still one big CLAUDE.md or have you split it up? submitted by /u/Fred-AnIndieCreator
Originally posted by u/Fred-AnIndieCreator on r/ClaudeCode
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