Your CLAUDE.md is useless

The lint hook reports three errors back to the agent after it writes a component

Why I stopped adding rules to my CLAUDE.md, and what makes an agent follow them: a linter that runs on every file it saves.

Your CLAUDE.md is useless.

Mine is over 800 lines long. Colours go through the design system. API calls go through a single file. No empty catch.

Before, every time the agent made a mistake, I added a sentence to that file.

It read the file at every session. And it still wrote a raw fetch in the middle of a component.

I no longer work that way.

Now every rule is a lint error. And as soon as the agent saves a file, the linter runs on it: the error comes back to it in the same response.

It fixes itself. I no longer remind it of anything.

I kept one sentence in the file: "a rule an agent can ignore is only a suggestion".

And you, how many lines is your CLAUDE.md?

This is the setup we use to ship projects at CovalTech.