Except that when its system prompt is full of instructions, caveats, design principles, gotchas, architecture notes, memories from the past, and personal preferences, at some point it's going to just ignore them outright. Heck, Claude Code won't even use critical instructions from a 100-line CLAUDE.md file sometimes. So you still have to be extremely vigilant about noncompliance.
My CLAUDE.md is deliberately very short, and only includes very specific rules like "never list yourself as a co-author or committer in git commits". Claude will very regularly ignore this rule, apologize every time I tell it to fix it, update its memories, etc. and then an hour later do the exact same thing again.
