alt Hacker NewsDoes anyone else struggle with getting Claude to follow even the simplest commands in CLAUDE.md? I’ve completely give up on maintaining it because there’s a coin flip chance it disregards even the simplest instructions. For instance, (after becoming increasingly exasperated and whittling it down over and over), my CLAUDE file now has a single instruction, which says that any ai generated one-off script should be named <foo>.aigen.ts, and I can’t get Claude to follow something as simple as that! It does sometimes, but half the time it disregards the instructions.
I use Claude all the time, and this is probably my biggest issue with it. I just workaround by manually supplying context in prompts, but it’s kind of annoying to do so.
Does anyone else struggle with this or am I just doing something horribly wrong?
Replies
Same experience, although I gave up already a while ago so not sure if CLAUDE.md is better followed in newer versions.
It's a known issue among us Claudemasters.
I have quite long CLAUDE.md file and claude code follows it almost all the time. When it was ignoring some instructions, i told it to update CLAUDE.md to make sure it does. It emphasized it with uppercase and IMPORTANT! ALWAYS DO ... and that make it work for me like 95% of the time. And I do this for multiple project with different CLAUDE.mds with similar results. I don't know why your experience differs so much.