Last week I helped a colleague look at a project.
He said he had clearly written “all APIs must return a unified structure” in CLAUDE.md, yet Claude Code kept following the old code. Then he found that a Hook he had configured the day before wasn’t running, and a Skill he had installed was nowhere in the list.
His first reaction was: Claude Code is acting up again.
I told him not to rush into reinstalling, and had him type /context first. The result was interesting: that CLAUDE.md hadn’t been loaded at all. The file was placed one directory level off, so Claude never saw it from start to finish.
This kind of problem is extremely common. When a configuration doesn’t take effect, nine times out of ten it’s not that the model isn’t listening, but that you thought it read the file when it actually didn’t; or it did read it, but it was overridden by another scope.
