Why Does CLAUDE.md Keep Growing? Catastrophic Remembering in Agentic Coding

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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 lifetime (+226%), gaining +4.9 net instructions every commit; further, the older an instruction gets, the less likely it is to be deleted (log-hazard -0.032/commit). Then, we show that prompt comments can halt the growth: inverting IFEval yields verifiable worlds whose optimal prompts are known, and there comments encoding latent reasoning remove 99.3% of excess instructions (+211.3% to +1.4%). Finally, applying the same inversion to WildIFEval, we show that prompt comments can improve real-world agentic instruction-following by up to 23.1%. If English is the new code, why don't we have comments yet?

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