The Handyman Principle: Why Your AI Forgets Everything

I keep having the same conversation with people struggling with Claude Code.

Someone tells me it "forgets" their instructions. Or it hallucinates fixes. Or it ignores the rules they put in CLAUDE.md. And when I ask what their setup looks like, it's always the same thing: a massive system prompt with every rule for every language, stuffed into context.

So I wrote up how I solve this.