The CLAUDE.md routing pattern: keep it minimal, delegate the rest

Most CLAUDE.md files I've seen are too long. 200 lines of coding conventions, API patterns, project context, debugging notes, and deployment steps all in one place. It works until you realize Claude is reading all 200 lines to answer a question about button spacing. Claude reads CLAUDE.md on every single turn. If yours is 200 lines, that's 4-6k tokens gone before the agent does anything. Most of it won't be relevant to whatever task is actually running. The routing pattern Keep CLAUDE.md short and have it point to other files. # CLAUDE.md Read these before anything else: - rules.md — coding conventions and things not to do - context/architecture.md — how the system is structured - context/api.md — external API contracts and auth patterns - sops/ — step-by-step guides for common tasks Load only the files relevant to your current task. That's 12 lines. Claude reads it, gets oriented, then pulls only what the task calls for. Why it works Claude doesn't need your deployment runbook to fix