How One Dev Team Stopped Their AI Instruction File From Ballooning to 548 KB

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A developer running an autonomous AI publishing pipeline shared how their agent's instruction file, CLAUDE.md, swelled to 548 KB after every incident and owner directive added a new rule with no deletions. The bloat caused the agent to conflate current rules with outdated annotations, undermining reliability. The team addressed this through three mechanical controls: a hard 45 KB file size cap enforced at the commit stage, splitting content into skill and reference files that load only when relevant, and a policy requiring old rules to be deleted in the same commit that introduces replacements. History is preserved in an archived version and a changelog rather than inline in the active file. The post closes as an open question, inviting other developers to share how they manage file growth, handle procedures outside the main file, and prevent personal preferences from becoming permanent rules in multi-contributor setups.

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