My CLAUDE.md is 582 lines. Here's why.
Every new Claude Code chat starts from scratch. The agent doesn't know your project, doesn't remember what you discussed an hour ago in another window, has no idea that a specific port on your server is off-limits. You explain the same things for the fifth time, and on the sixth try the agent still goes in to "fix" a config that was working fine.
Every week on r/ClaudeAI there's a new story. An agent deleted a production database. An agent pushed secrets to a public repo. An agent "optimized" a billing service and charged customers zero. Each time you read it, you think: I really don't want to be that person in the headline.
CLAUDE.md is supposed to solve both problems - context between sessions and protection against catastrophes. A typical CLAUDE.md at 5-10 lines solves neither. I decided to approach this as an architecture problem, not a list of reminders.