Context as a Public Good
The Tax You Don’t Notice My workspace CLAUDE.md was 210 lines. It loaded into every session, across every project, every time. That’s roughly 3,500 tokens of instructions Claude reads before I say a word. I never questioned it. The file grew over months. A gotcha here, a workflow pattern there, a rule I wrote after getting burned once. Each line made sense when it was added. In aggregate, it was mostly noise. ...