← All IntelClip / AI ToolsAblate line by line, and delete your CLAUDE.md every six months
From Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt · ≈5:52
Gives a concrete maintenance cadence for agent config: prompts written for older models become dead weight and should be re-earned, not inherited.
What’s in it
- Gives a concrete maintenance cadence for agent config: prompts written for older models become dead weight and should be re-earned, not inherited.
Clip transcript
cuz I press delete every 6 months for everything. >> That's right. That's right. We so to be fair, we don't delete the entire code base, but we do delete a lot. So every time there's a new model, we try we call it in a research you call this a ablation. And so what this means is you delete the entire system prompt and then you bring it back line by line to figure out what is the impact of each individual line. Um it's sort of like a eval and you can kind of like evaluate it and ablation essentially is a eval where you delete things to figure out the impact. And yeah, like we do the same thing for tools. Like we unship tools all the time. We you know, delete code in the harness all the time. If you look at actually the code that's in the Claude code harness today, almost all of it is about safety and permissions and static analysis and there's a bunch of UI code and we've actually unshipped a lot of the other code already. >> Do you think this way of building a agentic product and harness and basically doing ablations every time with a there's a new model release, should everyone in this room that's building AI products basically do that? Be comfortable and brave to press delete. >> 100%. Yeah, and and for people that aren't building agentic products, but you're using Claude code, every 6 months delete your Claude MD. Delete your skills. Delete your hooks. See what the model does and it might surprise you. And actually for Opus 5, this is something we really do recommend is just try deleting all of these things because the model might really just not need all those instructions that you needed for past models. >> Let's talk a bit about how then you
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