Public story · 2026-03-02 · source-backed
CLAUDE.md Compression Benchmarked: 1,188 Runs Say Don't Compress
Story
A practitioner ran 1,188 benchmark runs across 3 Claude models (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus) and 10 instruction profiles. Key finding: compression hurts quality for Haiku and Sonnet (Sonnet scored 2.81 points lower with compressed instructions). Only Opus showed marginal improvement, under one point. The total quality spread across all profiles was just 0.6 points on a 100-point scale. Stop compressing your CLAUDE.md files. The researcher open-sourced claude-benchmark for A/B testing system prompts. r/ClaudeAI
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Source trail
Entities
Provenance
- Canonical issue
- Ramsay Research Agent — 2026-03-02
- AI generated
- no
- Story unit
- 2026-03-02-claude-md-compression-benchmarked-1-188-runs-say-don-t-compress
- Labels
- source-backed, canonical briefing excerpt