Something to keep in mind is if your CLAUDE.md file is getting large, consider alternative approaches especially for repeatable tasks. Using slash commands and skills for workflows that are repeatable is a really nice way to keep your rules file from exploding. I have slash commands for code review, and git commit management. I have skills for complex tool interactions. Our company has it's own deployment CLI tool so using skills to make Claude Code an expert at using this tool has done wonders to improve Claude Codes performance when working on CI/CD problems.

I am currently working on a new slash command /investigate <service> that runs triage for an active or past incident. I've had Claude write tools to interact with all of our partner services (AWS, JIRA, CI/CD pipelines, GitLab, Datadog) and now when an incident occurs it can quickly put together an early analysis of a incident finding the right people to involve (not just owners but people who last touched the service), potential root causes including service dependency investigations.

I am putting this through it's paces now but early results are VERY good!

Try to keep it under 1k tokens or so. We will show you a warning if it might be too big.

Ours is maybe half that size. We remove from it with every model release since smarter models need less hand-holding.

You can also break up your CLAUDE.md into smaller files, link CLAUDE.mds, or lazy load them only when Claude works in nested dirs.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory