PRODUCTION SCENARIO
Your project CLAUDE.md has reached 650 lines. Roughly half of it is deployment caveats that only matter when someone touches infra/ or migrations/; the rest are review and naming rules that have to hold in every session and reach every teammate through source control. Engineers report that Claude ignores rules plainly stated in the file. A teammate proposes keeping the same content and splitting it into six files pulled in with @path imports.
Which restructuring restores adherence?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: Trim CLAUDE.md toward 200 lines and move the situational rules under paths frontmatter
Adherence falls off as a CLAUDE.md grows, which is why the documented target is under 200 lines, and paths frontmatter holds the infra and migration caveats out of context until Claude opens a matching file, while the universal rules stay where every session reads them. Splitting into imports is right when the goal is ownership and readability, because imported files still load and enter the context window at launch, so the line count is unchanged. Path-scoping everything is right when every rule is genuinely file-specific; here half of them would load in no session. Putting the universal half at user scope suits personal preference, and it stops those rules reaching teammates while leaving the caveats loaded in every session.
Official Source: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory ↗