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Probably, Approximately, Shipped
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Building software on a model that changes every six weeks breaks the one assumption the whole discipline was built on.
Boris Cherny built Claude Code. In late July, a few days after Opus 5 shipped, he stood in front of a room of founders and told them to delete their configuration files.
“For everyone that isn’t building agentic products, but you’re using Claude Code, every 6 months delete your Claude MD. Delete your skills. Delete your hooks. See what the model does.”
In any other engineering discipline that sentence ends a career. Nobody says: throw away your build configuration twice a year and see what happens. Configuration is where knowledge goes to be preserved.
I have a CLAUDE.md that has been growing since last spring. It tells the model not to add comments explaining the obvious, not to write tests I didn’t ask for, and about a dozen other things it got wrong once. Deleting it takes one command. I haven’t.
Cherny is right anyway, and the reason is sitting in Anthropic’s own release documents. Once you see it, the pile of stuff you’ve built around the model splits into two kinds. Some of it is consumable, some of it is capital. Most teams have the two mixed up.
