Self-improving CLAUDE.md files
a day ago
- Using CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md files improves agentic tools like Claude Code and Codex by providing project context.
- Manually updating these files becomes tedious and hard to maintain as project complexity grows.
- A trick is to use agent logs (JSONL files stored in ~/.claude/projects or ~/.codex/sessions) to identify common problems with CLAUDE.md.
- Prompting the agent to search logs and analyze improvements to CLAUDE.md, including patterns of frustration or repeated requests, works well.
- Parsing JSONL efficiently can be challenging, leading to complex jq commands, so a custom CLI tool was built for faster searching (open-sourced for Mac and Linux).
- The CLI tool reduces analysis time from minutes to seconds, and could be scheduled for self-improvement.
- Curating suggestions quickly helps, but better prompts could improve self-optimization.
- The author hopes Anthropic adopts AGENTS.md for better naming.