We put a codeword in six CLAUDE.md files and found that the parent-directory, working-directory, and CLAUDE.local.md files were in the first request at about 1,600 tokens each, while the two subdirect
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Thanks, Vlad. Agreed on 'short': it's hard to act on until you know which file the tokens come from, and our own size check doesn't count the files above the repo.
Vlad Zoff
The parent-directory result is the one I'd probably miss without measuring it. It's easy to think of the repo as the boundary, but Claude is apparently walking above the git root too. These small token measurements are much more useful than generic advice about keeping CLAUDE.md "short".