AI Agents4 min read
Agentic coding & prompt bloat
Catastrophic remembering: why CLAUDE.md files grow 226% and never shrink
An arXiv study of 1,867 repositories finds agentic coding instruction files like CLAUDE.md triple in size over their lifetime, because deleting a line risks regressions once its rationale is lost. The authors name it catastrophic remembering and show documenting the reasoning cuts excess instructions by 99.3%.
2026-08-15