{
  "id": 18651,
  "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11095v1",
  "title": "Why Does CLAUDE.md Keep Growing? Catastrophic Remembering in Agentic Coding",
  "summary": "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",
  "authors": "Kushal Chakrabarti",
  "category": "research",
  "topics": "agents-autonomy",
  "orgs": null,
  "regions": null,
  "published_at": "2026-08-11T16:00:55.000Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-08-12T05:10:43.828Z",
  "source_slug": "x-arxiv-cs-ai",
  "source_name": "arXiv cs.AI",
  "source_homepage": "https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/recent",
  "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/18651",
  "original_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11095v1",
  "evidence_status": "source-only",
  "attribution": "via ethics.ai"
}