Putting my CLAUDE.md on a diet: 19 KB down to 7.6 KB
TL;DR On September 6 I audited every file Claude Code loads at the start of a session on my main machine. The global CLAUDE.md went from 19,286 bytes to 7,607 (down 60.6%). The four biggest project memory indexes went from 64,900 bytes combined to 6,513 (down 90.0%). The file had more than doubled in under three months. A backup from June 18 was 9,242 bytes. Every addition had seemed reasonable when I made it. The biggest single category of cuts was model information: release lists, retirement dates, introductory pricing, spend estimates. I replaced all of it with a rule, “use only the models and efforts the active CLI offers”, and kept the judgment about which tier fits which task. The honest caveat: this is a document check. I verified that files parse, links resolve, and the constraints I care about survived. I did not benchmark whether Claude behaves better or worse, and I did not take a token count from a live session. Bytes are not tokens. If you have read my earlier post on re-tuning my setup for a new model, this is the sequel with a different lesson. That time I learned not to trust a model’s suggestions about what to delete. This time I put a validator and a rollback around the edits. ...