Add a canary to your Claude rules

The longer you keep a chat running in Claude, the more it starts to forget.

Not all at once. That's the problem. Claude doesn't shift from working correctly to being confidently wrong in one step. It drops one small instruction first. Then it starts filling gaps with assumptions. Then it's wrong about something, and it sounds completely certain.

By the time you notice, you've often been working with a drifting session for the last hour. Requests that seemed fine at the time. Output that was slightly off and you couldn't quite put your finger on why.

The fix is a canary.

A canary is one small instruction you add to your Claude rules file. Something like: start every reply with my name.

While Claude keeps using your name, your rules are loading and it's reading them. The moment it forgets your name, you know you've hit your context limit.

That's your signal. Clear the session. Start fresh. Carry forward only what you actually need.

Add this to your CLAUDE.md file today:

Start every reply with my name, followed by a colon.

Thirty seconds of setup. You'll never have to untangle a session that went wrong two hours ago.