Claude Code will ignore your CLAUDE.md if it decides it's not relevant

Noticed this in a recent blog post by humanlayer [here](https://www.humanlayer.dev/blog/writing-a-good-claude-md): >\## Claude often ignores `CLAUDE.md` >Regardless of which model you're using, you may notice that Claude frequently ignores your `CLAUDE.md` file's contents. >You can investigate this yourself by putting a logging proxy between the claude code CLI and the Anthropic API using ANTHROPIC\_BASE\_URL. Claude code injects the following system reminder with your `CLAUDE.md` file in the user message to the agent: ><system-reminder> >IMPORTANT: this context may or may not be relevant to your tasks. You should not respond to this context unless it is highly relevant to your task. ></system-reminder> >As a result, Claude will ignore the contents of your `CLAUDE.md` if it decides that it is not relevant to its current task. The more information you have in the file that's not universally applicable to the tasks you have it working on, the more likely it is that Claude will ignore your instructions in the file. The blog post itself is about HOW to write a good CLAUDE.md and worth a read. Figured I would share as I've noticed a lot of users struggle with the issue of Claude ignoring the CLAUDE.md file.