Comment by xpe
> I have found that more context comments and info damage quality on hard problems.
I'm skeptical this a valid generalization over what was directly observed. [1] We would learn more if they wrote a more detailed account of their observations. [2]
I'd like to draw a parallel to another area of study possibly unfamiliar to many of us. Anthropology faced similar issues until Geertz's 1970s reform emphasized "thick description" [3] meaning detailed contextual observations instead of thin generalization.
[1]: I would not draw this generalization. I've found that adding guidelines (on the order of 10k tokens) to my CLAUDE.md has been beneficial across all my conversations. At the same time, I have not constructed anything close to study of variations of my approach. And the underlying models are a moving target. I will admit that some of my guidelines were added to address issues I saw over a year ago and may be nothing more than vestigial appendages nowadays. This is why I'm reluctant to generalize.
[2]: What kind of "hard problems"? What is meant by "more" exactly? (Going from 250 to 500 tokens? 1000 to 2000? 2500 to 5000? &c) How much overlap exists between the CLAUDE.md content items? How much ambiguity? How much contradiction?