[dylanz]

> Claude basically disregards your instructions (CLAUDE.md) entirely

Does anyone know of a way to fix this? Claude constantly disregards my CLAUDE.md. I put a decent amount of time into it and it's pretty much worthless without explicitly telling it to reference it before each prompt.

[bontaq]

I've found really hammering it with *important*, all caps, "NEVER", etc finally made it start using the tidewave MCP for elixir development well. It felt really heavy handed but it worked.

For an idea of how heavy handed it was, this is my claude.md (with some explanatory text before): https://gist.github.com/bontaq/77b56d90b30e29c84c53c86d7fe05...

[scastillo]

This is just how the attention mechanism works.

(search for effective context problem for more info. e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21361)

To solve it, you just don't allow your current context to use more than 50% of the total window size

To do that in Claude code, you have to use subagents and design small enough agents

Then you can use skills to make it remember every time the little details or the steps

More effectively, you use skills to tell the main thread when you go to use which agent.

If you don't understand anything I said, try to restate the important things to the model periodically, and keep your tasks small.

Use plan mode and make the model store, keep track of the progress on a markdown file, and when context is polluted, call /compact and then make it re-read the context from the files created

You can prompt it as simply as:

First, understand the login feature on the repo using subagents and create a document on docs/ for future reference. Then, understand the task at hand and create an implementation plan. <task> blah blah </task>

Also, using XML tags makes the attention remember easily

[bobbylarrybobby]

Are agents still the way to go or have skills supplanted them? I don't really understand when you'd use one or the other