claude.md is hurting your claude code outputs

Evaluating the Use of CloudM in Cloud Code

Overview of Findings

• The speaker suggests discontinuing the use of CloudM within cloud code, referencing a study titled "Evaluating Agents.mmd."

• The study examined various frontier models to determine if context files like CloudM and agents.md enhance coding agents' performance.

• Results indicate that these context files do not improve task success rates; instead, they tend to decrease effectiveness.

Impact on Task Success Rates

• Context files are shown to reduce task success rates while increasing operational costs by 20%.

• The primary reason for this decline is identified as redundancy; adding information to a CloudM file effectively acts as a system prompt for every interaction.

• This redundant prompting often proves unnecessary, leading to inefficiencies in coding tasks.