AI coding instruction files grow 226% on average; study proposes 'catastrophic remembering' and comments as fix
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-09-07
A study of 1,867 GitHub repositories reveals that AI coding instruction files (e.g., CLAUDE.md) grow unboundedly, with instruction count rising 226% on average, and older instructions become harder to delete. The researchers term this 'catastrophic remembering,' the inverse of catastrophic forgetting. Key findings: instruction files more than triple over their lifetime, gaining +4.9 net instructions per commit; deletion likelihood decreases with instruction age (log-hazard -0.032/commit). The proposed fix is to attach comments recording the rationale behind each instruction, hidden from the executing model. In controlled IFEval tests, informative comments reduced excess prompt size from +211.3% to +1.4% without affecting constraint satisfaction. The paper asks: 'If English is the new code, why don't we have comments yet?'
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