Catch Claude forgetting your rules

The longer your Claude chat runs, the worse the answers get, and Claude never tells you why.

As a conversation fills up, Claude starts dropping your standing instructions to make room. Your tone of voice, your formatting rules, the context about your business, they quietly fall out of the window one at a time.

Most people never spot it. They just notice the answers drifting back towards generic and assume they prompted badly. And it bites hardest exactly when you are deepest into a piece of work, because a long chat is what fills the window in the first place.

You cannot see inside the context window, so you need a signal that fires the moment things start to slip.

I catch it with one line in my CLAUDE.md file, the file that holds my standing instructions: start every reply with my name.

Every response I get opens with Mike. The moment a reply arrives without my name at the top, I know my instructions are falling out of the window. If Claude has forgotten a rule that simple, it has forgotten other things too, and everything it writes from that point on deserves a second look.

When the name disappears, compact the conversation, or start a fresh chat and carry over the bits that matter. My rule of thumb is to compact once the context is about half used, before the quality starts to slide rather than after I have already shipped something generic.

The whole fix costs one line in a file. It turns a problem you cannot see into a problem that announces itself the second it starts.

Add the line today, then watch for the first reply that arrives without your name on it.