Why Does CLAUDE.md Keep Growing? Catastrophic Remembering in Agentic Coding

Agentic coding READMEs like CLAUDE.md grow without bound in real repositories, stopping only when the repository retires or someone rewrites the file wholesale. We trace this to imperfect recall: appending an instruction is always cheap, but once an instruction's rationale is gone, deleting it without risking a correctness regression costs O(2^|D|) in a prompt of |D| instructions. We name the resulting divergence catastrophic remembering, the inverse of catastrophic forgetting around which conti

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ethics.ai (11 August 2026), “Why Does CLAUDE.md Keep Growing? Catastrophic Remembering in Agentic Coding,” evidence record 18651, https://ethics.ai/record/18651 (originally published by arXiv cs.AI).

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