I like CLAUDE.md. I also think people are asking it to do a job it cannot do.
CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and .cursor/rules are where you put the rules you want an agent to follow: how to run tests, which folders are sensitive, what style the team uses, and when to ask before deploying. That is written context. It belongs in git.
But a coding agent also learns things while it works.
It discovers that a particular test is flaky under one flag. It learns why an apparently odd abstraction exists. It finds the deployment step that is not in the runbook yet. Those are not stable enough to hard-code into an instruction file, and they are too useful to lose when the session ends.
That is the distinction I use:
- Instructions are what your team writes down before the work.
- Memory is what your connected agents learn during the work.
The practical move is not to replace instruction files. Keep them. Add a small memory protocol beside them:
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