Your CLAUDE.md is probably too long. Here's how to cut it

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:00:00 +0000

A CLAUDE.md file starts life as five useful lines. Six months later it’s two hundred, half of which describe things Claude could work out by reading your code, and the instruction you actually care about is somewhere around line 140.

How Codex reads AGENTS.md, and how to layer it so the right rules win

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Codex reads instructions from AGENTS.md files before it starts work, and it doesn’t read just one. It builds a chain of them, in a documented order, and the order decides which rule wins when two disagree. If you’ve ever had Codex ignore a rule you were sure you’d written down, the layering is the first place to look.

Context on Tokenise

Your CLAUDE.md is probably too long. Here's how to cut it

How Codex reads AGENTS.md, and how to layer it so the right rules win