Comment by lubujackson 2 days ago
For whatever reason, I can't get into Claude's approach. I like how Cursor handles this, with a directory of files (even subdirectories allowed) where you can define when it should use specific documents.
We are all "context engineering" now but Claude expects one big file to handle everything? Seems luke a deadend approach.
I think their skills have the ability to dynamically pull in more data, but so far i've not tested it to much since it seems more tailored towards specific actions. Ie converting a PDF might translate nicely to the Agent pulling in the skill doc, but i'm not sure if it will translate well to it pulling in some rust_testing_patterns.md file when it writes rust tests.
Eg i toyed with the idea of thinning out various CLAUDE.md files in favor of my targeted skill.md files. In doing so my hope was to have less irrelevant data in context.
However the more i thought through this, the more i realized the Agent is doing "everything" i wanted to document each time. Eg i wasn't sure that creating skills/writing_documentation.md and skills/writing_tests.md would actually result in less context usage, since both of those would be in memory most of the time. My CLAUDE.md is already pretty hyper focused.
So yea, anyway my point was that skills might have potential to offload irrelevant context which seems useful. Though in my case i'm not sure it would help.
This is good for the company, chances are you will eat more tokens. I liked Aider approach, it wasn't trying to be too clever, it used files added to chat and asks if it figure out that something more is needed (like, say, settings in case of Django application).
Sadly Aider is no longer maintained...
They have an entire feature for this: https://www.claude.com/blog/skills
CLAUDE.md should only be for persistent reminders that are useful in 100% of your sessions
Otherwise, you should use skills, especially if CLAUDE.md gets too long.
Also just as a note, Claude already supports lazy loaded separate CLAUDE.md files that you place in subdirectories. It will read those if it dips into those dirs