More Rules, Worse Results: The Case for a Minimal CLAUDE.md

There are at least five Claude Code starter kits already published. They range from 27 commands with 4 npm packages to 47 commands with 4 MCP servers. Every single one of them is over-engineered. This isn't speculation. Arize AI's research on coding agent rules shows that optimized rulesets contain 20–50 rules and improve SWE-bench accuracy by 10–15% — without changing the model, architecture, or tools. HumanLayer's analysis is more pointed: as instruction count increases, instruction-following quality decreases uniformly . The model doesn't ignore your new instructions — it starts ignoring all of them . Claude Code's system prompt already uses ~50 of your ~150–200 instruction budget before your CLAUDE.md even loads. The kit that works best says the least. After building 42 skills across 13 repositories — Rails, React, Elixir, vanilla JS — I distilled everything down to 8 workflow rules, 8 skills, 2 agents, and 1 knowledge base. The base CLAUDE.md is 99 lines. With a stack appended, it