Delete your CLAUDE.md (and your AGENT.md too)

A study found that CLAUDE.md and AGENT.md context files used with AI coding agents either marginally improve performance (+4%) when developer-written, or slightly hurt it (-3%) when LLM-generated, while increasing costs by over 20%. The core argument is that modern LLMs are already good at exploring codebases autonomously, so bloated context files distract rather than help. Best practice is to keep these files minimal—only documenting consistent failure patterns the agent exhibits—and to focus instead on improving codebase structure, tests, and tooling. The author also shares unconventional prompting tricks like intentionally misleading agents to steer behavior, and recommends deleting auto-generated init files entirely.