"I am morally opposed to updating my CLAUDE.md" argues your config file is a grievance archive.

Alex Jacobs' post claims every line added 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 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. alex-jacobs.com The top comment splits it correctly: keep project facts, drop the scar tissue, use hooks for hard constraints. I went and read mine after this. About a third of it was written for a model that no longer needs the instruction.