We Audited Our Claude Code Setup Against Anthropic's Own Context-Engineering Rules — Here's What We Found

The question that started this We run Claude Code against a fairly large, fairly automated repository — a farming-assistance platform with a Node.js backend, a Flutter app, a React dashboard, an in-progress Spring Boot microservices migration, and a home-grown "repo memory" layer called gps that captures invariants, lessons, and preferences across sessions. Over several months we'd wired up a lot of automation: session-start hooks, prompt-submit hooks, auto-captured preferences, persona plugins, a mandatory agent-dispatch table. It felt sophisticated. It also felt, some days, slow to get going — every session seemed to start with a wall of text before any real work happened. So when Anthropic published "The New Rules of Context Engineering for Claude 5 Generation Models" , we asked the obvious question: are we actually following our own advice, or have we just accumulated automation that looks like good practice? This post is the audit, the root cause we found, and the fix — including a mistake we made mid-fix that's worth telling on ourselves for. What the blog post actually says Stripped of marketing language, the post boils down to five concrete rules: Keep CLAUDE.md lightweight. Describe gotchas and non-obvious patterns, not everything you know about the repo. Organize by relevance, not comprehensiveness. Progressive disclosure. Load context at the right time — skills, references, and detail should be pulled in when needed, not front-loaded into every session regardless of task. Trust the model's judgment. Remove redundant guardrails and standing instructions that the newer models don't need spelled out every time. Rely on automatic memory, not manual dumps. Don't hand-maintain a giant preferences block in a markdown file — let the memory system surface the right thing at the right time. Design tools and interfaces, not prose. Push instructions into tool schemas and parameter design rather than repeating them in the system prompt. None of this is radical. It's t