Why Does CLAUDE.md Keep Growing? Catastrophic Remembering in Agentic Coding
Agentic coding READMEs like CLAUDE.md grow without bound in real repositories, stopping only when the repository retires or someone rewrites the file wholesale. We trace this to imperfect recall: appending an instruction is always cheap, but once an instruction's rationale is gone, deleting it without risking a correctness regression costs O(2^|D|) in a prompt of |D| instructions. We name the resulting divergence catastrophic remembering, the inverse of catastrophic forgetting around which continual learning is organized. First, we characterize this phenomenon across 247,694 instruction lifetimes in 1,867 repositories: agentic prompts grow without bound, more than tripling over their life...
| Authors | Kushal Chakrabarti |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 11 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 August 2026 |
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