I've found that maintaining minimal structural cues (typically a single repeating heading) in Claude.md helps it better index information. And anecdotally a lot less GREP'ing, web searching and wasted tokens.

I also include a short instruction a the top of my file. Requiring context to be written as single line rationales with up to 1 additional line for links/refs/pointers. While explicitly forbidding "tutorial-like" explanations and blocks/pages of code.

Curious if others have experimented with this — I found the memory system files compressed more aggressively than the project CLAUDE.md because they had more prose decoration. Anyone tried a middle ground where you keep human-readable formatting in the project file but compress the memory files only?

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