'I Am Morally Opposed to Updating My CLAUDE.md' Argues Your Config File Is a Grievance Archive

alex-jacobs.com (surfaced via r/ClaudeAI)·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Alex Jacobs' August 19 post, at 138 upvotes on r/ClaudeAI, argues that every line added to a project instruction file documents a moment of frustration and then freezes that constraint in place as models improve, so a meaningful portion of any mature CLAUDE.md is now actively steering a smarter model away from better behavior. His second claim is that Claude was post-trained inside a specific harness, so heavy custom system prompting creates novel failure modes nobody else can reproduce. His alternative is real-time conversational correction that expires with the context. The top comment splits the difference: keep project facts, drop the scar tissue, use hooks for hard constraints.