I find the Claude.md file mostly useless. It seems to be 50/50 or LESS that Claude.md even reads/uses this file.
You can easily test this by adding some mandatory instruction into the file. E.g. "Any new method you write must have less than 50 lines or code." Then use Claude for ten minutes and watch it blow through this limit again and again.
I use CC and Codex extensively and I constantly am resetting my context and manually pasting my custom instructions in again and again, because these models DO NOT remember or pay attention to Claude.md or Agents.md etc.
You can easily test this by adding some mandatory instruction into the file. E.g. "Any new method you write must have less than 50 lines or code." Then use Claude for ten minutes and watch it blow through this limit again and again.
I use CC and Codex extensively and I constantly am resetting my context and manually pasting my custom instructions in again and again, because these models DO NOT remember or pay attention to Claude.md or Agents.md etc.