Yes
Any longer constraints would get either selectively ignored or cause confusion when starting sessions
luodaint on Hacker News
In the thread “How Claude Code works in large codebases”
Helped: Keeping constraints under 50 lines to prevent regression.
Got in the way: Longer constraints caused confusion or were selectively ignored.
As a result of shipping a working product for six months with Claude Code integrated into SaaS production, the only surviving constraints had all been less than 50 lines: migrations' generation vs execution conventions, authentication flow invariants, internationalization setup rules. Any longer constraints would get either selectively ignored or cause confusion when starting sessions. The important distinction: CLAUDE.md will not explain how the model understands your architecture. …