I’ve been using Claude Code daily across a few projects, and my rules keep growing. Every mistake turns into a new line. Eventually the startup docs alone took about 37k tokens, and I got that down to 28k by compressing them. So I tried hard word limits on every doc. That backfired. Across six repos the checker flagged 692 paragraphs, and 37% of those were less than 20% over. Most of my doc warnings were noise, and real problems got buried. Now I’m replacing the limits with a short writing guide: say each thing in one place, only write what’s true now, and for each sentence ask whether deleting it would make the reader do something wrong. What I still can’t judge is which rules are actually doing anything. A rule that’s working looks the same as a rule Claude would have followed anyway. How do you tell the difference? Do you test by removing rules, keep a log of what they prevented, or just go by feel? What’s the last rule you deleted, and did anything break? submitted by /u/Duckducklaugh
Originally posted by u/Duckducklaugh on r/ClaudeCode
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