The CLAUDE.md sections that actually matter (and the ones wasting your context)

I wrote a linter that counts instructions in CLAUDE.md files, and running it against my own projects taught me something uncomfortable: the problem was never that my files were too short. Every single one had plenty of content. The problem was that most of that content was doing nothing — or worse, actively crowding out the ten lines that mattered. "Keep it short" is the advice everyone repeats now, and it's correct. Anthropic's own best-practices doc says to keep it concise and human-readable,…