My projects have specific build/verify steps as well, and after a certain point Claude forgets to run them. I’m going to try a “No brown M&Ms” hook to halt Claude if it tries to run the default command instead of the instructed commands from CLAUDE.md. Perhaps this will be a good signal that a compacted or fresh session is needed at that point to avoid mistakes.

I mean, that’s basically the magic of the harness. The whole thing that skyrocketted the intelligence is that the harness (cli tool) prevent the LLM from editing the file before reading it.

Can you imagine even a junior making such a mistake?