In my AI journey I've increasingly become frustrated with some decisions made by the agent without even bothering to ask or reference almost 110 pieces of documentation detailing our entire system.

I've peppered CLAUDE.md with anti-patterns and references to our documentation as "must read" including our coding standards, but no joy. It loves finding "workarounds" to language used in there an override it by literally saying things like "I knew enough from my training data to not have to reference your documentation"

It ended up bloat. And I had to use its memory feature (that works sometimes) to help overcome some things. Still frustration.

So I explored "rules" with paths. If it hits a certain path, a rule loads (like for my domain aggregates) that directly references my documentation and contains some anti-patterns.

But this wasn't the silver bullet. It used bash with Grep/read inside of it to "overcome" not getting the rule to trigger. So I wrote a pre Tool use hook to deny it access to do so for the folders that should trigger the rules and force the documentation into its context.

It also reason's around the LSP which I think is insane, new rule, new pre Tool use.

With some of the testing I've been doing, it's behaving way better than it did previously, but I'm just waiting for the next little workaround it does to sidestep my documentation or rules.

It might be overkill? Has anyone fiddled with rules yet? In terms of context bloat, it doesn't add much after killing its auto memory and CLAUDE.md file from what I can see.

I've even wiped some skills and went back to basics.

(For context, this is a dotnet solution with about 153 projects, not small by any means)