My Claude Code Harness: Swap the Project CLAUDE.md for My Own

The shared project I work on has a CLAUDE.md of about 12,000 tokens. My replacement is about 900. In Codex, an AGENTS.override.md does the swap. Claude Code has no override file, so I built one from 2 parts: a setting that skips the team’s file, and a hook that loads mine. What loads at startup Claude Code loads ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, then the CLAUDE.md in the folder you start in and every folder above it. (That’s the instruction side of memory. I wrote about where auto memory lives before.) A subfolder’s CLAUDE.md loads later, only when Claude reads a file in that folder. A folder added as an extra working directory doesn’t load its CLAUDE.md at all, unless you set CLAUDE_CODE_ADDITIONAL_DIRECTORIES_CLAUDE_MD=1. So if you start in ~/Workspace/acme/app/ios, the big ios/CLAUDE.md is in context before you type anything. Run /context to see it. The “Memory files” section lists every loaded file with its token count. Step 1: exclude the team’s file Add claudeMdExcludes to…

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