And you don’t find that Claude cheerfully ignores the content of your CLAUDE.md and does whatever the fuck it wants instead?
I caught it ignoring the prompt’s details, so added “include the output of the Unix ‘date’ command with each response.
And that worked great in that its absence became an indicator that Claude was off-prompt. Until it started including made-up strings that resembled, but had nothing to do with, the output of the Unix ‘date’ command.
Given your description of the behavior, my guess is context window compression bit you. Less likely if it's a root level CLAUDE.md and you used a recent version of Claude Code.
I caught it ignoring the prompt’s details, so added “include the output of the Unix ‘date’ command with each response.
And that worked great in that its absence became an indicator that Claude was off-prompt. Until it started including made-up strings that resembled, but had nothing to do with, the output of the Unix ‘date’ command.