ACI-006: The Great Simplification

Thesis

Every CLAUDE.md that reaches a certain complexity gets burned down and rebuilt from scratch. The simplification event is not a failure -- it is the moment the team learns that agent guidance works best when it is short, specific, and architectural rather than long, comprehensive, and instructional.

Story

Intent's CLAUDE.md started as a 65-line document in March 2025. It instructed Claude on everything: how to write Elixir (15 bullet points of code style), how to find the technical product design document, how to update a journal at session end, how to coordinate work via steel threads. It grew to roughly 120 lines when Backlog.md integration was added in July 2025 -- a whole section explaining two competing task-tracking systems, with workflow diagrams and quick-start guides.