The Bigger Your CLAUDE.md Gets, the Slower Claude Code Runs — Measuring Context Injection Bytes Weekly to Catch Degradation Early

Short summary

The author details how Claude Code's context injection grows silently as rules accumulate in CLAUDE.md and related files, causing performance degradation that reached 40KB with 99 forgotten agents still loading. They built a weekly self-audit shell script that measures injection bytes, agent counts, and frustration indicators, automatically triggering self-correction when thresholds are breached. The article includes concrete bash code and threshold configuration for the audit pipeline.

• •Claude Code context injection grows silently and degrades performance
• •Weekly self-audit script measures injection bytes, agent counts, and frustration signals
• •Automatic self-correction triggers when configurable thresholds are exceeded

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