Why CLAUDE.md must not be too specific | Context Engineering - courses.vizuara.ai

Here is a line you should never put in your CLAUDE.md: "If a user asks how much, reply: our plans start at $9.99 per month for basic." Why is that a bad idea? Because it is too specific. What happens when your pricing changes next week? Think about the lifespan of these files. A CLAUDE.md barely changes once you finalise it - its life is measured in months. Your project runs for weeks or months, and across that whole span the file stays largely constant. I built one for an AI developments tracker and it has not changed since the first version. Now put a fact that changes weekly inside a file that changes monthly. You have built a landmine. A real example of the same mistake. I once wrote: check GitHub, check X.com, check LinkedIn. Specific platforms, named. What happens when I need to track a fourth one? Write it at the right altitude instead: ❌ "These are the buckets I always look at." ✅ "Look at social media sites - LinkedIn, Reddit, X.com, for example - and track well-known people working in AI." Same intent. But now the file leaves room for the thing you have not thought of yet. Context Engineering - courses.vizuara.ai