Why Does CLAUDE.md Keep Growing? Catastrophic Remembering in Agentic Coding
Agentic coding READMEs like CLAUDE.md grow without bound in real repositories, stopping only when the repository retires or someone rewrites the file wholesale. We trace this to imperfect recall: appending an instruction is always cheap, but once an instruction's rationale is gone, deleting it without risking a correctness regression costs O(2^|D|) in a prompt of |D| instructions. We name the…
We haven't written up this one. arXiv cs.AI has the full story — the link below goes straight to it.
