Stop Over-Prompting Claude: What Its Own Creators Just Taught Us

The Advice That Sounds Like Heresy

At Y Combinator's Startup School this year, Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, gave advice that would have been unthinkable in 2025: "Every 6 months, delete your CLAUDE.md file, delete your skills, and delete your hooks. Then see what the model does. It might surprise you."

CLAUDE.md files, skills, and hooks are the instruction scaffolding that developers wrap around Claude: standing rules, step-by-step procedures, and automated checks. Cherny's point was not that instructions are bad. It was that instructions written for last year's model can actively hurt this year's model. And he was speaking from experience: Anthropic deleted more than 80% of Claude Code's own system prompt for the Claude 5 generation of models, and performance on their coding evaluations did not drop. The company even shipped a command, called doctor, whose whole job is trimming oversized instruction files down to what the current model actually needs.

You are probably not maintaining a CLAUDE.md file. But if you have been using Claude for legal work since 2024 or 2025, you almost certainly have the lawyer's equivalent: a folder of elaborate prompt templates. And the same shift applies to them.

Why Yesterday's Prompts Hurt Today's Models

The prompting playbook that circulated through the legal profession in 2024 and 2025 was built to compensate for real weaknesses. Models back then skipped steps, so we enumerated the steps. They wrote shallow analysis, so we commanded them to "think step by step." They drifted from the role, so we opened with "Act as a senior partner with 20 years of experience." They missed errors, so we added "double-check your work" to everything.

Each of those compensations targeted a failure that current models largely no longer have. Claude now plans multi-step work without being told to, verifies its own output without being asked, and does not need a fictional resume to write in a professional register. Anthropic's own guidance for the Claude 5 generation says it plainly: instructions written to patch an old model's weaknesses become standing constraints the new model has to reconcile on every single request. A prompt with twelve numbered steps does not just waste your typing. It can produce worse output than a clear statement of the goal, because the model follows your twelve steps instead of the better plan it would have made itself.

Two examples lawyers will recognize:

• "Double-check your work" now causes over-verification. Current Claude models self-verify by default. Stacking an explicit re-check command on top produces longer, slower, more hedged output, with no accuracy gain. What was best practice in 2025 is now a tax.
• Step choreography overrides better judgment. If your contract-review template marches Claude through steps in a fixed order, the model will comply, even when the document in front of it calls for a different order. Stating what you need and the constraints that matter, then letting the model plan, now routinely beats the script.

What This Does Not Mean

Before you delete your prompt folder, two important cautions, both of which showed up immediately when practitioners debated this advice. A widely shared response thread in the Claude community was literally titled "delete your CLAUDE.md? (no. don't)", and its objections are sound:

• Deleting everything deletes your context too. Your templates do not only contain incantations. They contain decisions you already made: your jurisdiction, your document conventions, your client-communication standards, the specific caveats your practice area requires. That material is not scaffolding. It is context, and context is exactly what the model still cannot know on its own.
• The advice is a periodic experiment, not a purge. Cherny's actual recommendation is to retune on a cycle: try the minimal version, compare results, and keep whatever the comparison proves you still need. That is maintenance hygiene, the same reason you update a form file when the rules change.

The right frame for lawyers: delete the incantations, keep the context.

What to Delete From Your Legal Prompts

Audit your saved prompts for these five categories. They were all reasonable in 2025. They are all candidates for deletion in 2026:

• Role-play preambles. "Act as a senior partner with 20 years of experience in commercial litigation." The model does not write better because you gave it a fictional resume. State the audience and the register you want instead: "This memo is for a sophisticated client, not a lawyer. Plain English, no hedging."
• Thinking commands. "Think step by step." "Take a deep breath." "Reason carefully before answering." Current models decide how much to reason on their own, and these phrases no longer change the quality of the reasoning.
• Step-by-step choreography for judgment tasks. Numbered procedures make sense where exactly one sequence is safe. For analysis, review, and drafting, state the goal, the constraints, and what done looks like, then let the model plan.
• Redundant verification commands. "Double-check every citation before responding." "Review your answer for errors." The model already does a version of this. Your verification duty has not gone anywhere, but it lives with you, not in the prompt (more on this below).
• Threat and emphasis inflation. "CRITICAL:", "You MUST", "NEVER, under any circumstances." Current models follow instructions closely, so inflated emphasis causes over-compliance: rigid answers, excessive caveats, and refusals at the edges. Say what you mean once, at normal volume.

What to Keep (and Even Expand)

Everything the model cannot know without you is worth more than ever, precisely because the model now uses it well:

• The facts of the matter. Parties, dates, procedural posture, what has already happened. More context here has always helped, and still does.
• Jurisdiction and governing law. "Analyze under Florida law" changes the answer. No model update makes this optional.
• Audience and purpose. A demand letter, an internal memo, and a client email need different registers. Say which one you are writing and who will read it.
• Your actual constraints. Word limits, filing requirements, house citation style, the clause positions your firm will and will not accept. These are the load-bearing parts of a good template.
• Confidentiality boundaries. What you have redacted, what stays out of the prompt entirely, and which tier you are on. Our plan-by-plan breakdown covers why client work belongs on commercial data terms.

This is why the shift does not make prompt libraries obsolete. It changes what a good saved prompt looks like: less script, more brief. The best templates in our prompt library were always the ones that carry context (what to provide, what to constrain, what output to require) rather than the ones that choreograph the model's reasoning. If you use our CRAFT framework, note what survives this shift untouched: Context, Audience, Format, and Task are all context. The role-play "R" is the piece that has aged.

Your Duties Did Not Shrink

Here is the part of "let the model cook" that does not translate to legal practice. When Anthropic says the model self-verifies, it means the model checks its own reasoning more than older models did. It does not mean the output is verified in the sense your license requires.

Your duty of competence and your duty of candor to the court do not care which model generation you are on. Every citation gets confirmed in a real database before it goes in a filing. Every factual claim gets checked against the record. Every analysis gets your judgment before it reaches a client. The 1,000+ logged cases of AI-fabricated citations in court filings were almost all failures of lawyer verification, not failures that better prompting would have prevented. Delete the "double-check your work" line from your prompts because it no longer helps the model, not because checking stopped being your job. Our ethics guide covers the full framework.

The Six-Month Retune, Lawyer Edition

Cherny's cadence is worth adopting directly. Twice a year, run this experiment on your three most-used prompts:

• 1. Save a copy of the current template. You are experimenting, not burning boats.
• 2. Write the minimal version: the task, the context (facts, jurisdiction, audience), the constraints, and the output format. Cut every instruction about how to think, how careful to be, or who to pretend to be.
• 3. Run both on the same matter (a closed or hypothetical one) and compare outputs side by side.
• 4. Keep what the comparison proves. If a deleted rule turns out to be load-bearing, add it back in one plain sentence. If the minimal version wins, the deleted lines were costing you quality the whole time.

Most lawyers who run this experiment on a current model find the minimal version is as good or better, and dramatically easier to maintain. If you want a starting point for which model to run it on, see our model guide.

FAQ

Do lawyers still need prompt templates in 2026?

Yes, but their job has changed. A good template is now a context-carrier: it reminds you what facts, jurisdiction, audience, and constraints to provide, and pins the output format you need. Templates that script the model's reasoning step by step are the ones that have aged badly.

Should I stop telling Claude to double-check its work?

In your prompts, yes. Current Claude models verify their own output by default, and stacking explicit re-check commands produces slower, more hedged answers with no accuracy gain. Your own verification of citations, facts, and analysis remains mandatory. That duty belongs to you, not the prompt.

What is CLAUDE.md and why is everyone talking about deleting it?

CLAUDE.md is an instruction file developers use with Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool. Its creator advised deleting it every six months as an experiment, because instructions written for older models can constrain newer ones. The lawyer's equivalent is the elaborate prompt template: same logic, same experiment worth running.

Does minimal prompting mean shorter prompts overall?

Not necessarily. Cut instructions about how to think and behave, but context should stay and often grow. A prompt with two pages of relevant facts and one sentence of instructions will now usually beat a prompt with one paragraph of facts and two pages of rules.

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