Claude Code users are moving deterministic rules out of CLAUDE.md and into hooks to save tokens
r/ClaudeAI (252 upvotes, 61 comments)·medium signal
A 252-upvote post drew the line as CLAUDE.md for things Claude needs to understand, hooks for things that simply need to happen every time: format after edit, block writes to protected files, run checks before certain commands. The top comment (146 upvotes) pushes further, arguing linters, CI, SonarQube, knip and mypy are undervalued deterministic checks on AI output, and that you can run a dev environment strict enough that a human would quit but the agent does not mind. One commenter shared a hook that blocks Claude from using sed.